And a plug for my friends at <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.fig.co/">https://www.fig.co – if you want to crowd fund your game.</p>\n<p><strong>Is product market fit thought of differently in mobile games? Is it more retention based than “people are beating a path to your door/demand is exploding”? Seems many breakout mobile games are more the result of game with good retention and great UA strategy than they are about releasing it and it “taking off”</strong></p>\n<p>It’s much closer to player / market fit. And it’s closer to consumer – if you have your servers melting, you have product market fit. But when you first release your game, definitely drive a small amount of traffic to it (few thousand) in your target and work on your retention numbers, then I would start driving more traffic once retention is good.</p>\n<p><strong>Can you tell us more about how you see the future of mobile gaming (Hyper casual to High-core)? Do you see gaming ecosystems and how big companies (Facebook, Twitch, Google, Apple etc) are thinking about it?</strong></p>\n<p>So I may be jaded here, but because mobile has become more mature, I think the ones that make it a big hit will tend towards more core and niche than casual. This does not mean that the theme cannot be casual, but mechanics will likely be core. This is because content is so readily available that it is easy for someone to leave quickly, which is what casual tends to do more of. Even all the popular casual games definitely loop in more core mechanics – progression, player level ups, etc…</p>\n<p>In terms of gaming ecosystems – I’m a big believer in growing platforms provide gaming ecosystems. I think the larger ones (except twitch) focus on platform for all types of applications and not just gaming. It’s just that people love games and the highest revenue generating app tends to be games on any given platform. I think this is how PC games and mobile games are able to get their start. I do think there is still room for console or some type of hardware (VR?) gaming, but getting mass adoption will be difficult until you can reduce barriers of entry.</p>\n<p><strong>A little long-winded question: Sam Altman and others have said in the past that ‘starting a hard startup is easier in the long run than starting an easy startup’. Which means, if you’re solving a hard problem for people, initially it can be painful, but gets better over time because more people will be motivated to join you, invest in you, and be part of your mission. I worked for one such company for many years, and it was well worth it. Now, I was into game development growing up, and I got back into it in recent past with some potentially good ideas. But I started struggling to motivate myself because of questions like ‘it’s not real value to people’, ‘it’s not impactful to society’ popping up in my head all the time. It felt like making games wasn’t akin to solving a real problem for anyone. Do you ever struggle with such questions as a game designer? Do you think gaming companies have a disadvantage in terms of, 1) how much lasting value they actually bring to people, and 2) how much talent they can attract as a result? How do you get around this? And what’s your opinion on communities like gamesforchange.org that are trying to mix in game development with societal impact?</strong></p>\n<p>I get questions all the time about what I’m doing is frivolous. I absolutely disagree.</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>This is how human beings learn and behave. Most people who tell me how they don’t like games or play games – I am absolutely astonished and say “well I think there hasn’t been a game made for you.” <= AND this coming from someone who did not grow up in the gaming industry OR as a gamer. Games are how we learn and connect. The first game a human being plays is peek-a-boo he/she is learning “object permanence”.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Ever notice that building a great gaming company can come from anywhere in the world? You have amazing game makers in every continent. To make a Hollywood blockbuster movie, you should go to Hollywood. To build a big tech company you should go to Silicon Valley. But not games – you don’t need to leave. This to me drives home point #1.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Games obviously solve a real problem for people or else they would not be spending time on there. This is the hardest problems of all, because usually what games are solving are not tangible – they are problems of loneliness, loss of purpose, sense of low worth, boredom, lack of motivation, and yes even physical pain.Countless people use games to solve all those problems.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Games is entertainment. It goes a step further in that it is interactive entertainment. In entertainment you get the privilege to influence culture. People cannot be what they cannot see, as game makers we enable them to not just see (and be) what they cannot see. Help them see the greater good in themselves as a game maker.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>I can go on and on… but those are some of my initial thoughts.</p>\n<p>Games drive forward adoption of technology, they are the forefront of change, and I think its’ up to game makers to be responsible with that power. That is how you make lasting change.</p>\n<p>My general sense of games + social impact: I certainly think games for social impact make sense, but you have make that into a game in it of itself and not really tell players it’s for social impact and then surprise them! what if Pokemon go was about exercise, that would be no fun!!</p>\n<p><strong>1. When you first started, how you dealt with spam/bad content in the community? What policies, mechanisms you and your team implemented? (anything besides manually scanning the content).</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Did you used social media to grow the community? If so, what did you do? Do you consider social media an effective way to grow a community? When the value of the product lays in the community, it is hard to start.</strong></p>\n<p>I felt like I started 3 companies in the last 11 years, but I will try to answer the most relevant experience to you question.</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>We had an admin tool for our fan communities and appointed officers to help us clean content. We did do it manually but we outsourced it to officers. For our games, we created some tools to help within the chat rooms to enable others to mute others and then eventually automated the prevention of spam.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>When we were early on Facebook for our fan communities we went into existing groups to tell people to install our application. When we did our mobile games we spent most of our time with UA – mainly because it was cheap. UA is really good when it’s an untapped channel but hard to grow. Now with UA being so expensive, I would consider doing grass roots social media.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>How to model games where “Player exp” will potentially decrease?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Many “games” start from level 0, then the player exp/levels grow monotonically, so players can feel the rewards for their effort.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>What about the other type of “games” – think Fitness tracker, flashcard memory apps, that players actually start somewhere, and if they stop they actually go backwards. Giving them reward points for progress itself might be misleading – they actually gain weight / forgot, say. While punishing them & deducting their exp could be frustrating.</strong></p>\n<p>Within games there are other things that start with a number and decrease (instead of the other way)<br />\n1. Energy – often times I’m limited by the number of lives like in Candy Crush<br />\n2. I usually start with a # of coins and I need to use it over time<br />\n3. In many pet and sim games, if I do not take care of them, they die<br />\n4. Limited number of actions (spins) done in a day</p>\n<p><strong>My startup is a gamified Q&A app where a global community of language learners practice by checking each other’s writings. Our gamification consists of leveling up, unlocking features and earning virtual currency that can be used to buy power ups. There’s some social interaction that consists mostly of users following and helping each other.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1. Given that we have to prioritize features, in general, how do you know when it’s a good time to build gamification features over building social features, or vice versa?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Some of our users are a bit upset about having to unlock features, but we use this as a motivation for them to help others (everything is free). Do you have any tip on how to make users see unlockable features in a positive light?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3. We have avoided adding paid features because we fear this could create an stratified community where things are not earned by merit alone. Is there a good way to charge for extra features without affecting the dynamics of the community?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I’m not sure the difference between the gamification features and social features? How does someone level up and how can they use their power ups?</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Sometimes you can give them a sample of what the feature is unlocked and lock it more based off of the second time they use it. Almost give a free trial so they know what they are trying to unlock.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>You can charge for things that do not impact whatever they need to earn points or level up. You can limit the number of things someone can get checked and then charge them money, split that money with the translator. In a game like League of Legends they only charge for skins or cosmetic things so as not to impact the core of the game.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>What are your thoughts on virtual reality gaming? Do you think it will go mainstream and if so what is your prediction to when?</strong></p>\n<p>Ah, opining on VR! A favorite past time of a gamers and techies.</p>\n<p>I think right now the VR gear is to cumbersome for it to be mainstream. You have to set up a whole rig and room. Compare that to the phone, where you just have to pull it out of your pocket and start playing. On top of that, most of the content I see for VR is just not that great. So I’m going to gear myself up, look more than an idiot than I already look for less of an experience? No thank you.</p>\n<p>I liken it to a bit of snorkeling vs. scuba diving. Snorkeling is much more accessible to the masses, less gear and less training. I can see some really great things. But if I want to see even better things, I need to learn how to scuba dive, put up the gear and prep a lot more! The content just better be worth it.</p>\n<p>I do eventually think it will go mainstream if it can solve some of the usability issues and phenomenal content on the other side.</p>\n<p><strong>1. Do you see e-sports or e-sports betting as markets with exponential growth?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Which e-sports platform or game has the gamers that are most obsessed with statistics or live statistics?</strong></p>\n<p>e-Sports has a larger audience than NFL. That’s pretty crazy!</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Yes e-sports is definitely a growing industry.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>I do think betting can be big – my issue with betting is it’s been so regulation heavy in the US and have seen it kill regular sports betting companies (a la Fan Duel)</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Not sure.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>What would you do if your product was engaging and fun, but didn’t have enough k-factor or new users to scale to meaningful size organically? How long do you iterate versus try something new?</strong></p>\n<p>I am assuming that the monetization strategy is ads or something with a lot of audience and that usage is important. If that is the case, I would give it 3-6 months iterating to crack the k-factor and then consider moving on.</p>\n<p><strong>We are building facebook messenger chatbots for restaurants for getting new customers and re-engaging existing customers. We have gamification as a core part of our user acquisition and retention strategy. We are using contests like Spin the wheel (variable rewards) and steal of the day (fixed rewards) to acquire restaurant customers on the chatbot.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>We will also be using variable reward based games as a way to increase customer loyalty for restaurants. For instance, we will send out a message saying your spin has recharged, spin and see what you get. Along with this we are also building a gamified referral system with a social aspect. My questions are:</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1. What are some best practices of building product retention using gamification?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. In your experience, what are the key elements of a gamified reward system which make it addictive? For instance, I really admire Google Tez scratch cards as a product feature.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3. Are there any resources you would recommend to gain deep insights into gamification?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I don’t think gamification builds retention. I think the core of your product needs to be retentive and sticky. Facebook does a great job at creating a core loop first and then giving you signals and gamifying it.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>I’m not familiar with Google Tez scratch cards, but in a non-game, I think creating a core loop of a behavior that can become a habit. Games work differently in that they set a core loop and the game is the purpose, whereas your purpose maybe different entirely.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>I would consider a lot of work from BJ Fogg to help.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.bjfogg.com/">https://www.bjfogg.com as well as Dan Ariely: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://danariely.com/">http://danariely.com
/nP.S. Bonus article: <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://medium.com/startup-grind/do-this-one-thing-to-make-your-product-sticky-aa8ed6d55797/">https://medium.com/startup-grind/do-this-one-thing-to-make-your-product-sticky-aa8ed6d55797
/nWe cofounded queue.gg, which is a marketplace that lets gamers hire coaches for 1:1 online coaching and replay feedback. We’re pretty excited that someone from the gaming industry is doing an AMA here!</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1. How can we combat cyberbullying in online gaming? Gamers are notorious for talking crap to each other and sometimes creates a toxic enough environment to the point a shooting happens (the recent Madden shooting) or swatting.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Can you tell us what your goals were when you oversaw the worldwide People and Culture function?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3. Coaching in e-sports is still uncommon and not a norm in society. How can we change that?</strong></p>\n<p>Congrats on launching!</p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I think there are a couple of reasons why gamers can get out of hand: 1. usually highly achievement zero-sum oriented games, you attract competitive people 2. Layer on anonymity and it can become a place that is really difficult. If you are a game developer or a platform you can enact decency rules or better yet penalize players that go too far. I can’t find the article but I think LoL implemented a user tribune to help combat poor user behavior. This was several years ago I remember reading about that. In terms of the Madden shooting, I’m very very sad about that and I personally think it’s related to a larger problem that is not applied to gamers.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>The people and culture function was related company building. Once you get product market fit, company building is your second job as founder. Our goals were very aligned with the business and would change as the business would change. An example of this is we needed to focus on building a long term relationship with the customer, from the culture side, we saw that our only metric of the customer that was shared widely was revenue. This was not a great way to build a relationship with our customers. So we began looking at other metrics such as retention , alliances and also added in qualitative ways to build a better relationship with our customers.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>I think e-Sports needs to become more mature. Once there is a clearer paths of longevity like the NBA or the NFL then all the support and feeder leagues can happen. Right now it’s a growing but not fully mature field. This is what makes it exciting!</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>I’m keen to know more about user behaviour insights and learnings from Kabam, corporate social network.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Specifically, what motivated people to engage and initiate new discussions among peers? And you were to do this again, how differently you will do it?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>At my startup, StackRaft, we are re-thinking professional social graphs to connect people with global and remote opportunities.</strong></p>\n<p>With the corporate social network we had very little traction. In our opinion it was because people did NOT want to keep talking about work when they were done with with work. They were at work to work, not socialize.</p>\n<p>If I were to do it again, I would find something that they wanted to do and tie it with what they needed. As we are moving towards a gig and freelancer economy, I do think a social network that is wider than the company may make sense. These people are always looking for the next job and their company is themselves.</p>\n<p><strong>I’m actually building a mobile game. Targeted at kids and using voice as a component. My main question is what is the best way to test, validate and market your game on a shoe-string startup budget. I’d love your thoughts on my game if you had time as well.</strong></p>\n<p>Here are some initial ideas:</p>\n<ol>\n<li>Recruit friends with kids and see if you can do a “playdate” with them – offer free child care or offer it as a class! Parents of toddlers are always looking for ways to entertain. </li>\n<li>Go to the library and offer it as a class for toddlers </li>\n<li>Create a signup list for the beta </li>\n<li>Infiltrate some facebook groups and recruit users there. </li>\n</ol>\n<p>Hope that helps!</p>\n<p>P.S. I’ve assumed that this is a game for toddlers because of the name.</p>\n<p><strong>We’re on a mission to connect the human brain to the computer using an AI-powered headset device. We’re currently exploring potential applications for our product in the gaming industry and I’m more than happy to have the opportunity to ask you a few questions.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1) What do you think is the next big thing in the gaming industry when it comes to character control?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2) Do you think that adapting a game content based on physiological signals might be a good idea at all?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3) Do you envision any disruptive innovations in improving the video game console (components, electronics and/or any other hardware-related improvements to be made), controllers/joystick upgrades, etc. happening soon?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>4) Are you familiar with any gaming studio company that is experimenting with hard tech innovations or products at the moment?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Funny enough, I’m bullish on voice as the next big gaming platform. Mainly because it’s immersive and so easy to get into.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Could be really interesting!</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>I certainly think the more you can remove barriers of entry the greater mass adoption will be. I honestly think consoles and controllers and terribly unusable. This is how I think mobile gaming was one of the reasons it could grow so fast</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>A YC company called Plexus is creating a smart glove, but they re not a gaming studio. There are a ton more YC companies that are hard tech innovations, less with gaming.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>1. Why didn’t the social network for corporates work? and how did you pivot from fan communities to mobile gaming? Especially what made you or helped you take these pivotal decisions.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Assumably, first thing a B2C based founder does is that – sharing the amateur(beta) version of the product to friends, and family and ask for their suggestions, Is this a good way because this set of users don’t give us the straightforward reviews? how did you manage to get product market fit for “Kabam”?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>(Funny thing is my mom[traditional South Indian] understood the business, she is playing with the app and literally is doing the marketing for me which I did not realize until a few days back – she calls up her friends and ask them to try out the Android version).</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I think the way we executed it, we sent an unsolicited email so many employees were confused and hesitant to use it. Many companies thought we were not trustworthy. Basically no one was using us, so that is why we pivoted. When we pivoted we learned it was really hard to build a platform and for us that meant we could not get users to come to us, so we learned – go where the users are. We were incredibly lucky as Facebook had just launched their platform and they were growing like gangbusters.</p>\n<p>Product-wise we learned a couple of things:<br />\na) We did not hit people’s passion points. People were not searching for stuff about work outside of work. Therefore we couldn’t ride off of any free traffic from Google by people searching for our stuff<br />\nb) We needed to provide value within an ecosystem we could play in. This meant instead of going after enterprises (we didn’t know inside the company their rules), we could create fan communities around TV and help TV show creators get to know their audiences more.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Yes find the customers and watch them use it. IT’s more important to watch them use it than to have them give you feedback. You certainly should ask for feedback, but in B2C, what and why they say it is worthless compared to what they do. I feel like in user testing which we did, it is there to look for patterns. But most people cannot tell you if they will use it or buy it = they may say it and not do it.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>When asking users questions, ask them about the last time they used a product like yours, ask them to show you how they found it it, what they did, etc… Easier for users to be telling a recount than what they WOULD do.</p>\n<p><strong>1) At a high-level, how did you approach game design when leveraging others IP vs. creating your own?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2) Did you typically use multiple structures for agreements? Were the majority of rev-share based with some level of a guarantee? What were the core variables that you found really important to discuss on both sides to have deals that ended up with both parties happy?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>In leveraging someone else’s IP you have to be true to that story and things in that world. In many ways for us it de-risked execution because we did not need to invent new characters or story line. Therefore game design for us focused heavier on systems design, progression and level ups. In creating our own we needed to think about story line and environment more in addition to systems design.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>By the time we worked with IP at Kabam we were a larger size. There were definitely rev-share with a minimum of guarantees. Anytime there is attribution of traffic to figure out rev=share that should be clearly spelled out how it’s done. Also you should talk about marketing plans of supporting one another pre-through launch. It is good to stick a person to help manage this integration and ask for support on their end. Also make sure you know what the rights are for. A lot of IP licensing is sliced and diced on platforms and geographies. Make sure you know what you are getting.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>I’ve a few questions about the early days of Kabam.</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1.) How did Kabam, in general, choose what games to make?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2.) What was the first game?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3.) How did you decide on the idea to build Kingdoms of Camelot?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>Our CEO really liked games, almost all kinds – MMO, RPG, FPS, and strategy/ city builder games. At the time Facebook only had the clicking games from Zynga and the one that made the most sense to build was a strategy/city building game. It was within our capabilities and really put a graphical interface to some of those text-based Facebook Games (remember Mafia Wars?)</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>The first game was Kingdoms of Camelot on Facebook</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>We chose Camelot as a theme because it was in the public domain, accessible and fun rich deep theme.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>I am a cofounder on an educational game company targeting adult learners (you may read Anthony’s question, too).</strong></p>\n<p><strong>My question is evolving around how you think it is possible for game based startups to get an MVP for investors out the door, in a decent amount of time and with an acceptable quality. For me this seems way harder to pitch to investors as one has to fight the aspect of doing a game (some investors already see this as less serious than web services) at the same time as fighting the effect that people focus way more on graphics in a game than on its functionality (compared to websites). Using game engines and assets already helps a lot, but it still seems that games make it hard to match the growth rates and development times expected by startup investors. Can you provide insides on how to solve this problem? 🙂</strong></p>\n<p>This is a hard problem. In general investors shy away from investing in games not because it’s “less serious” but because it is “hits driven” and it’s content. So just because you make one game, it is unclear if you can make another game that is as big of a hit – in other words it is not as repeatable. Where this is different is when you have a fundamental shift in the platform, and technology or even business model to show that the games are not just one hit. A great example is the free to play model or really the IAP (in-app purchase) model. That business model was very new to the gaming world as before it was just console games (you pay up front, no more and no less) .</p>\n<p>Other ways to de-risk it for investors is to run a crowdfunding campaign and show that there are players or capital lining up for this game. You can do this at www.fig.co</p>\n<p>Or you can go to a gaming platform like roblox try to start it. If you are in a country that gives gaming grants like Australia. That is another option.</p>\n<p>If you have a good gaming pedigree, you can look on Angellist and find some founders of gaming companies that angel invest.</p>\n<p><strong>1. Futuristic – where gaming and gamification will be 10-15 years time and how it will impact our societies and industries – please use your boldest predictions?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. Any thoughts how legal industry may use, learn from or benefit from gaming industry (or gamification)?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>3. What are the key learnings/advices that you can share from your role of Head of Worldwide People and Culture function? Any surprising ones?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>My thoughts are not as grand – I think voice is going to be a large immersive seamless platform. Platform is still incredibly nascent.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Move off of Word Perfect! My feeling is that the legal industry is one of the slowest to adopt new technologies. This is because they bill by the hour. Anything that reduces their time means less profits. I think there are other things that need to be fixed first in order to start changing. The one thing the industry can learn from gaming is to align incentives with its end goal. It doesn’t seem to be the case right now.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Key Learnings – people will surprise you! Good and bad. I feel like HR is one of the most under appreciated professions. They are like the complaint desk for the company. And, therefore can not attract as high of a caliber it can. It is changing a lot as more founders are moving into the company building phase. Companies that do it right have a great free system and people infrastructure to move the company in the direction it is needed. And give your HR person a hug today 🙂</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p>How can you gamify things like elearning platforms i.e. leaderboards, quizzes etc.</p>\n<p>I feel like for non-games you have to be true to your core loop of behavior. If you don’t have a core behavior, then you should ask yourself what is that behavior and build around it. Gamifying can help reinforce it.</p>\n<p><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.foggmethod.com/">http://www.foggmethod.com
http://danariely.com
https://medium.com/startup-grind/do-this-one-thing-to-make-your-product-sticky-aa8ed6d55797
I know that one of the things that I really need for our team is a strong game designer. How would you go about finding one in the Bay area (I’m in Mountain View) and what qualities and questions should I be asking them?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>What kind of game are you making? Game designers come in all forms: map design, level design, systems design. You will likely need to be more specific. It is okay if you don’t get the terminology write, just plainly write “what you will do” in bullet points on the job req.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>Assuming you do not have a lot of capital, If you have a solid team, then you’ll be able to attract a solid game designer. If not, likely you can attract an inexperienced one. If you have traction, you can also attract a solid game designer. Without these it is cash or equity. This is the beginning of what you will need to do for the rest of the life of the company – recruit.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>How much weight do you give to a top-down analysis (e.g., platform, category, etc.) versus a bottom-up analysis (e.g., core loop, innovative mechanics) when selecting a new game development project?</strong></p>\n<p>I weigh top down analysis much more – platform and category. Sam talks about how you cannot create technological waves, but you can certainly ride the wave. This has been our experience at Kabam from a user point of view as well as a fundraising perspective. It was so much easier for us to fundraise when the gaming industry was doing well, irrespective of our performance. When facebook or mobile were growing so were our games.</p>\n<p><strong>Parts of our product has some gamification factor in it, particularly a reputation system that incentivizes people to engage and contribute quality answers to a question (symbolizing credibility).</strong></p>\n<p><strong>1. I was wondering if you had any tips/resources for going about designing a reputation system?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2. We would like to test our MVP soon and was wondering what the process of getting and growing initial testers was like in your experience?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>I’m not sure off the top of head about designing a reputation system. However, here are a couple of tips when we were designing our communities:<br />\na. Find elements in the badge that show trust. Usually the basic thing is tenure. Oftentimes you will see “Member since” , so you can see how veteran the person is and vet their answers accordingly<br />\nb. Two sided reviews. The underclassmen should be able to rate the upperclassman and vice versa. I think uber and Lyft do this well. This creates trust on both sides and helps keep people honest.<br />\nc. Rating . A rating will flow from quantity and quality. There may be more elements, but those are off the top of my list. If you are creating a community, you will need to think about roles and moderation and what they can do.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>If you can get a couple of folks within a school some underclassmen and some upperclassmen that would be the best. If you are close to a school you can advertise there, or you can post in a Facebook group. I would recruit a couple from each group and have them use your product. Ask them questions and watch what they do.</p>\n<p>Once you have your product ready, you should consider the platforms of where students hang out and go advertise there. I’m not sure if you are targeting high school or college or some other level of schooling or even country, so a little general on some of the sources.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<p><strong>1) At a high-level, how did you approach game design when leveraging others IP vs. creating your own?</strong></p>\n<p><strong>2) Did you typically use multiple structures for agreements? Were the majority of rev-share based with some level of a guarantee? What were the core variables that you found really important to discuss on both sides to have deals that ended up with both parties happy?</strong></p>\n<ol>\n<li>\n<p>In leveraging someone else’s IP you have to be true to that story and things in that world. In many ways for us it de-risked execution because we did not need to invent new characters or story line. Therefore game design for us focused heavier on systems design, progression and level ups. In creating our own we needed to think about story line and environment more in addition to systems design.</p>\n</li>\n<li>\n<p>By the time we worked with IP at Kabam we were a larger size. There were definitely rev-share with a minimum of guarantees. Anytime there is attribution of traffic to figure out rev=share that should be clearly spelled out how it’s done. Also you should talk about marketing plans of supporting one another pre-through launch. It is good to stick a person to help manage this integration and ask for support on their end. Also make sure you know what the rights are for. A lot of IP licensing is sliced and diced on platforms and geographies. Make sure you know what you are getting.</p>\n</li>\n</ol>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1103221","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2018-11-09T01:27:44.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T11:59:58.000-07:00","published_at":"2018-11-09T01:27:44.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d1","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"y-combinator","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/1200px-Y_Combinator_logo.svg.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200).\r\n\r\nThe startups move to Silicon","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/y-combinator/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7118a","name":"Gaming","slug":"gaming","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/gaming/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7117f","name":"Startup School","slug":"startup-school","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startup-school/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71180","name":"#startup-school","slug":"hash-startup-school","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a710d1","name":"Y Combinator","slug":"y-combinator","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/1200px-Y_Combinator_logo.svg.png","cover_image":null,"bio":"Y Combinator created a new model for funding early stage startups. Twice a year we invest a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200).\r\n\r\nThe startups move to Silicon","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/y-combinator/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/gaming-ama-with-yc-visiting-partner-holly-liu/","excerpt":"YC Visiting Partner Holly Liu recently did aGaming AMA with Startup School founders. It was so good that we wanted to shareit here.","reading_time":22,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71931","uuid":"f8771430-ae61-498b-9d57-84a44d351bb3","title":"How Do You Measure Leadership?","slug":"how-do-you-measure-leadership","html":"<!--kg-card-begin: html--><p>Are you a good leader? How do you know?</p>\n<p>In a startup culture that is obsessed with management by metrics, many founders struggle to answer this critical question about themselves. It’s tempting to measure leaders simply by the success of their businesses. But even the most successful founders know how much timing and luck can be confounding factors in this approach. Measuring leadership through bottom-line company performance also fails to provide any clues as to how someone can improve as a leader. So is there a better way?</p>\n<p>This essay describes a way to measure leadership that I hope will be helpful to those who seek to improve as leaders. It is based on observations I made when working closely with four leaders that I consider extraordinary: Ed Catmull (Pixar’s founder), Steve Jobs (Pixar’s CEO), John Lasseter (Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer), and Bob Iger (Disney’s CEO). To my surprise, these men could not have been more different in style, temperament, and approach. They did not conform to a single model of leadership. One was an introverted scientist while another was an extroverted artist. One was a college dropout who had founded a company and was infamous for brash behavior while another was a career executive who was exceptionally genteel and diplomatic.</p>\n<p>Despite their differences, these men were able to create an extraordinary amount of trust in the people around them. They built trust by doing the same three things exceptionally well, though each in his own way. I believe that these three traits are the foundational traits of great leaders You cannot be a great leader without them because you cannot build trust without them. And the trick to measuring leadership is to measure a leader’s effectiveness along these three dimensions, as detailed in the notes section <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/how-do-you-measure-leadership/#survey-questions\">at the end of this post</a>.</p>\n<h3>Three Foundational Characteristics of Great Leaders</h3>\n<p>I believe that people of all temperaments, personality types, and personal/professional backgrounds can be great leaders, and that they can lead quite differently and still be successful. But to be trusted and followed as a leader, you must excel in three key areas:</p>\n<p><strong>1. Clarity of Thought and Communication</strong></p>\n<p>Great leaders think and communicate clearly. They describe a vision of the future that people find compelling to work hard to achieve. If your employees are confused about your mission and strategy, or do not find it motivating or credible, they will not follow you with the focus and determination necessary to succeed.<sup id=\"footnoteid1\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote1\">1</a></sup></p>\n<p>Clarity of thought always precedes clarity of language. To improve your communication, the best thing you can do is to spend more time thinking about what you believe is truly important for your business. Once you’ve crystallized what’s important for everyone to understand, practice expressing it in simple terms. Simplicity is vital. A great example is the retail strategy that Amazon’s Jeff Bezos <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-brilliant-advice-for-anyone-running-a-business-2015-1/">communicated to his team years ago. He based it on three simple but enduring customer preferences: lower prices, bigger selection, and faster delivery. To this day, anything Amazon employees do to lower prices, expand selection, and accelerate delivery creates value for the customer and advances the company’s strategy. As Bezos said, “You can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time….when you have something that you know is true, even over the long-term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.”</p>\n<p>Taking time to prepare internal communications becomes increasingly important as your company grows. As you scale, your employee base grows more diverse, and fewer of your employees have a personal relationship with you. Hence, they are much less likely to just “know what you mean” and more likely to be confused and critical if you don’t communicate well.</p>\n<p>Great leaders spend hours preparing their internal communications. They don’t just wing it, no matter how naturally talented they are as communicators. As an example, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke and his senior team spend hundreds of hours preparing for their annual employee Summit. As Tobi says, “We want to be a loosely coupled, highly aligned company. The Summit is the main enabler of this because it is a grand sync. We spend countless hours preparing because if we communicate well at the Summit, we achieve great alignment by the end. We can then use our weekly townhalls to keep us from drifting too far apart until the next Summit.”</p>\n<p><strong>2. Judgment about People</strong></p>\n<p>Great leaders have great intuition about people, particularly when it comes to selecting people to whom they give power and responsibility. They are able to see hidden potential in people and detect cases where ambition exceeds ability. And when they make hiring or promotion mistakes, which are inevitable, they have the courage to rectify the situation if the employee cannot be coached to improve. Nothing does more damage to an organization or to the standing of a leader than picking the wrong leaders or failing to correct these mistakes when they happen. The judgment around the initial hiring or promotion decision is the most important, as leaders who fire too many of their own also lose a lot of credibility and trust.</p>\n<p>Not everyone is naturally gifted when it comes to intuition about people, but everyone can improve. Gathering more data will help you make better people decisions. When looking to hire leaders, try to meet as many of the best people in the field as possible as a way to sharpen your recognition skills. Spend as much time as you can getting to know executives that you are considering hiring. In a <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"http://www.geekwire.com/2016/qa-uber-cto//">2016 interview</a>, Uber CTO Thuan Pham describes being interviewed by CEO Travis Kalanick for “30 hours straight, one-on-one, over two weeks,” including over Skype when Travis was traveling. “Throughout those 30 hours,” Pham continued, “I actually forgot it was an interview. It was just like a discussion between two colleagues.”</p>\n<p>It also helps to do extensive reference checks on hires and ask for examples of behavior that shows good judgment and high integrity because these traits are hard to test in an interview. And try to learn from cases when you hire or promote the wrong person and are not able to coach them to improve.</p>\n<p><strong>3. Personal Integrity and Commitment</strong></p>\n<p>Great leaders have exceptional personal integrity and commitment to their mission. Integrity means standing for something meaningful beyond oneself rather than being motivated by narrow personal interests. It means being able to admit when you have made a mistake rather than acting like you are always right and having the humility to receive critical feedback openly and work to improve. It means avoiding behavior like favoritism, conflicts of interest, inappropriate language, inappropriate work relationships, etc., that erode trust. A useful test is to ask yourself: if your team had full transparency into your private communications and behavior towards employees, would you be embarrassed by anything you have done or said? This is a high bar, but one that great leaders strive to meet.</p>\n<p>Beyond putting in the time, great leaders make their work into their core life mission in ways that inspire others. They derive deep personal meaning and fulfillment from leading people to achieve a mission. Their personal commitment translates into high levels of personal productivity and execution, which in turn becomes the foundation for pushing their organizations to do the same.</p>\n<h3>It All Adds Up To Trust</h3>\n<p>So how do you know you are good leader? You are a good leader if you excel in the three areas described above and thereby earn the trust of the people around you.</p>\n<p>Building trust in this way is both a science and an art; it requires both competence and character. Trust is built when leaders think clearly about the future and move their organizations to the right place, in terms of product, sales, and people. Do the predictions you make about the future – about the products you should build, the investments you should make, and the changes in competitive or technological landscape – prove to be accurate? And do the people you have chosen to lead in your organization prove to be the right ones? Over time, the answers to these questions become known, and if you answer a lot of these questions correctly, you earn trust. I consider this the “science” of building trust. It’s built on clarity of thought, good communication, and good judgment about people.</p>\n<p>The art of building trust is more complicated. It is closely tied with a leader’s ability to communicate with integrity. It is built when you say the right thing at the right time, and show empathy and good judgment. It grows when you stand for ideals bigger than yourself rather than caring primarily about your personal success, wealth, fame, or position. It also grows when you are honest with others, admitting what you don’t know, and not trying to be someone else. This is why you can’t try to copy Steve Jobs or Ed Catmull in your quest to be a great leader. You can only be yourself.</p>\n<p>Most leaders understand the science of building trust. They understand that they need to think and communicate clearly about product and strategy and make good choices when they are hiring and promoting people into leadership positions. They understand that they have to show deep commitment and get things done. But in my experience, the truly great leaders also understand the art of building trust. Leaders have to make many hard decisions – firing people, taking responsibility for mistakes, disappointing people by saying no, etc. Great leaders treat these challenges as opportunities to build trust. They ask themselves which course of action and which style of communication will increase the trust that employees have in them. When faced with a difficult challenge, they optimize for trust.</p>\n<p>This, perhaps, is the lesson that great leaders teach everyone else. In difficult times, as you evaluate one course of action versus another, ask yourself which path will generate more trust in you as a person and as a leader. Always try to choose that path.</p>\n<p><em>Thanks to Tobi Lütke, Tyler Bosmeny, Daniel Yanisse, David Rusenko, Sam Altman, Michael Seibel, and the YC Continuity team for reading drafts of this essay.</em></p>\n<p></b> </b></p>\n<hr />\n<hr />\n<p></b> </b></p>\n<div id=\"survey-questions\">\n</div>\n<p><strong>NOTES:</strong></p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;\"><strong>Survey Questions for Evaluating Leaders</strong></span></p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;\">The best approach to measuring leadership is to evaluate a leader’s performance in the three areas in which all great leaders must excel: clarity of thought / communication, judgment about people, and personal integrity / commitment. Measuring leadership in this way requires gathering data from employees, but most startups have never done this in a systematic way.</p>\n<p></span></p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;\">Eventually, all companies need to develop methods to gather employee sentiment and turn it into structured data. In fact one of the core responsibilities of a good HR team is to gather and document employee sentiment and use it to assess leadership.<sup id=\"footnoteid2\"><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnote2\">2</a></sup> I suggest that startups begin to gather this data systematically once they reach about 50 people in size.</span></p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #888888;\">Whatever set of data gathering techniques is used, it’s critical to ask the right questions to assess leadership performance. These sample questions are meant to serve as a starting point for a more thorough employee survey. These questions are written to evaluate a CEO, but can easily be adapted to any leader in the company. Part of the goal is to see the level of alignment between a CEO’s responses and that of the employees.</span></p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>1. Clarity of Thought and Communication</strong></span>\n</p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for the CEO</strong></span>\n</p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Write down your company’s mission, strategy, and key metrics (“mission-to-metrics”) in less than 2 minutes.</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Write down 2-3 themes that you have consistently emphasized in your communications to employees.</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for Employees (current and departing)</strong></span>\n</p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What is the company’s mission and strategy? </span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What are the most important operating metrics that measure the company’s success?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How does your work contribute to these key success metrics?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How often has the company’s definition of mission, strategy and metrics changed in the past 24 months? Or has it been the same over this time?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What do you think is really important to the CEO? What does he or she consistently emphasize in communications?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How effective and clear is the CEO in the following communication methods: written, speaking to a large group, speaking with a small group? </span></li>\n</ul>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>2. Judgment About People</strong></span>\n</p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for the CEO</strong></span>\n</p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Rate the effectiveness of each leader you have promoted or hired at the company.</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Write down the name of any leader that you have promoted or hired that you don’t think is actually the right person to lead his/her area.</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Have you exited the right employees? Or have you made mistakes?</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for Employees (current and departing)</strong></span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Has the CEO chosen good leaders at the company?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Which leaders do you respect and why?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Are there leaders that you think are weak and why?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Has the CEO replaced any leaders in the past year? Were these good decisions, from your perspective?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">What are the strengths and weaknesses of the senior leader (i.e., CEO direct report) who oversees your area?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Have any high performing members of your team chosen to leave the company in the past year? Why did they choose to leave?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Ask departing employees: are they leaving because of concerns about senior leadership?</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>3. Personal Integrity and Commitment</strong></span></p>\n<p dir=\"ltr\">\n <span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for the CEO</strong></span>\n</p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Are there actions you have taken which you feel have diminished the confidence that employees have in your integrity? What are they?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Do you ask for feedback about your performance? Are there examples when you have responded to employee feedback and changed your behavior?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How do you rate your level of commitment to your job?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How do you rate the level of commitment of your direct reports?</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><span style=\"color: #808080;\"><strong>Questions for Employees (current and departing)</strong></span></p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How would you rate your CEO’s integrity / moral compass?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Do you think the CEO listens well and is open to feedback? Are there examples where feedback has changed the CEO’s behavior in a positive way?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Have you seen examples of favoritism, inappropriate relationships, inappropriate language, conflicts of interest, or any other unethical behavior in the CEO?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">When asked anonymously, what do employees / direct reports feel motivates the CEO?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">How would you describe the level of personal commitment that the CEO shows to the mission of the company?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Have you seen examples of lack of commitment from the CEO?</span></li>\n<li><span style=\"color: #808080;\">Have you seen examples of lack of commitment from other leaders or from employees?</span></li>\n</ul>\n<p><b id=\"footnote1\">1</b> Please see “<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/the-second-job-of-a-startup-ceo/#creating-purpose-and-alignment\">What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO</a>” for a more thorough discussion of creating purpose & alignment.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid1\">↩</a><br />\n<b id=\"footnote2\">2</b> Data gathering methods include employee roundtables mediated by the CEO or HR, structured questions asked as part of employee exit interviews, all-hands or team meetings to gather employee feedback, hiring of external consultants to survey or interview employees, and on-line or email surveys of employees.<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"#footnoteid2\">↩</a></p>\n<!--kg-card-end: html-->","comment_id":"1098199","feature_image":null,"featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2017-01-19T02:02:07.000-08:00","updated_at":"2021-10-20T13:16:13.000-07:00","published_at":"2017-01-19T02:02:07.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"custom_template":null,"canonical_url":null,"authors":[{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71078","name":"Ali Rowghani","slug":"ali-rowghani","profile_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/02/Ali.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ali is Managing Director of YC Continuity, where he invests in & advises growth-stage startups. Ali directly contributed to the growth of 2 great companies — as CFO / COO at Twitter and COO at Pixar.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/ali-rowghani/"}],"tags":[{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71156","name":"Growth-Stage","slug":"growth-stage","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth-stage/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71158","name":"Leadership","slug":"leadership","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/leadership/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71174","name":"Advice","slug":"advice","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/advice/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a7116d","name":"Essay","slug":"essay","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/essay/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71181","name":"YC Continuity","slug":"yc-continuity","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/yc-continuity/"},{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71182","name":"#ycc","slug":"hash-ycc","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"internal","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/404/"}],"primary_author":{"id":"61fe29e3c7139e0001a71078","name":"Ali Rowghani","slug":"ali-rowghani","profile_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/02/Ali.jpg","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ali is Managing Director of YC Continuity, where he invests in & advises growth-stage startups. Ali directly contributed to the growth of 2 great companies — as CFO / COO at Twitter and COO at Pixar.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/ali-rowghani/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71155","name":"Growth","slug":"growth","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/growth/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/how-do-you-measure-leadership/","excerpt":"Are you a good leader? How do you know?In a startup culture that is obsessed with management by metrics, many foundersstruggle to answer this critical question about themselves. It’s tempting tomeasure leaders simply by the success of their businesses. But even the mostsuccessful founders know how much timing and luck can be confounding factors inthis approach.","reading_time":9,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null}]},"url":"/blog/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team","version":null,"rails_context":{"railsEnv":"production","inMailer":false,"i18nLocale":"en","i18nDefaultLocale":"en","href":"https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team","location":"/blog/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team","scheme":"https","host":"www.ycombinator.com","port":null,"pathname":"/blog/convincing-engineers-to-join-your-team","search":null,"httpAcceptLanguage":"en, *","applyBatchLong":"Winter 2024","applyBatchShort":"W2024","applyDeadlineShort":"October 13","ycdcRetroMode":true,"currentUser":null,"serverSide":true},"id":"ycdc_new/pages/BlogPage-react-component-b53b98ac-84f6-4ed4-abe9-c58a715452a8","server_side":true}" data-reactroot=""> by Harj Taggar9/7/2018 Harj Taggar is cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (YC S15). Triplebyte helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world, with the least amount of time and effort. Before cofounding Triplebyte, Harj was a Partner at YC. Once you’ve found an engineer you want to hire, the final step is presenting them an offer to join your team and convincing them to accept it. This post offers advice for increasing the percentage of the offers you make that are accepted. Since working on Triplebyte I’ve been surprised by just how much variance there is in this rate among companies. Companies that use Triplebyte have acceptance rates ranging from as low as 10% to as high as 90%. Generating an offer for an engineer is expensive. It takes time to source good candidates and then hours of your engineering team’s time doing technical phone screens and onsite interviews. You’ll likely need to complete five onsite interviews to generate a single offer (the industry standard onsite interview to offer rate for engineers is around 20%). Assuming six hours of engineering time spent interviewing that’s 30 hours of engineering productivity lost. Given this cost it makes economic sense to work as hard as you can to get your offers accepted. The work to increase your offer acceptance rate begins well before presenting the offer itself. It starts with designing a great candidate experience at each step leading up to the offer. Every interaction a candidate has with you must balance your need to extract signal from them while still getting them excited about joining. This begins with doing something seemingly simple – being responsive. Read this blog post to get an engineer’s perspective on the importance of speed and responsiveness in their job search process. Being fast and responsive seems like obvious advice and yet we still see companies move slowly and miss out on good people. There’s two reasons this happens. The first is entropy. Maintaining an organized system for managing candidates is hard. It will naturally trend towards disorder unless you work really hard against it. This is especially true for larger companies with more people and processes. As a smaller startup speed is a huge advantage you have over them when competing for engineers. Make this easier for yourself by using software to manage and track the status of your candidates. At first you can use something simple like a spreadsheet or Airtable. As you grow and need to setup interview panels to gather feedback from interviewers you should graduate to a real ATS (Applicant Tracking System) like Lever. Make it clear who has responsibility for reviewing and acting on candidates every day. The second reason is psychological. It’s easy to believe that candidates who drop out because you were slow weren’t interested in your company anyway. This is bad reasoning and will make you miss out on good candidates. Managing a job search process quickly becomes overwhelming, especially for the best candidates with the most options. To even have the chance to close the best candidates treat every candidate dropping out before you replied them as a failure, not a lucky escape. With an organized and responsive process in place you can now focus on optimizing the quality of each candidate interaction. This starts with the first call. The first call with a candidate typically lasts for about 25 minutes. I’d recommend the following agenda: It’s common to leave asking the candidate what they’re looking for until the end of the call. I think that’s suboptimal because you miss the opportunity to tailor your pitch around it throughout the call. If you’re an early stage company (less than 20 people) a founder should always be doing this call with engineering candidates. Commonly you’ll have one technical founder and one non-technical/sales founder. I’d recommend the sales founder do these calls even if they can’t speak in detail about the technical challenges. This gives the technical founder more uninterrupted time to build (maker vs manager schedule). The sales founder should at least have enough sales ability to convince engineers to meet the technical founder in person to learn more about the technology. As you grow you’ll hire a recruiter and typically they’ll do these calls. I’d recommend doing the following to best set them up for success: If the first call goes well you’ll usually move the candidate forward to a technical phone screen with an engineer (companies that use Triplebyte will skip these phone screens and move straight to the onsite). These phone screens are usually 45 minutes of the candidate working through a coding problem and screen sharing. I’d recommend allotting one full hour for the phone screen. 45 minutes for working through a technical problem and up to 15 minutes for a conversation between the candidate and engineer to ask each other questions. Ideally you want to select the engineers who are best at pitching your company for these phone screens. There are also ways to make the experience more candidate friendly e.g. letting them pick from several problems to solve during the call. This creates some more work for you but if a candidate can show their strength on a problem they enjoy they’ll have a more positive feeling towards you. You can also let them code in their own environment and screen share with you instead of using an artificial environment (though some of these e.g. Coderpad do have advantages of better collaboration and recording features). If the technical phone screen goes well, the next step is the onsite interview. The onsite interview will be the first time a candidate meets your team in person. Their experience throughout the day will be a huge deciding factor in where they end up. It’s important to think through the details of the candidate experience when setting up your onsite. Start with the basic logistics and be sure to: A standard onsite interview agenda will typically look like this: If you’re early stage I’d recommend having at least one of the founders involved in the closing Q&A. It can also be a good idea to include a demo or roadmap section here at the end. Give the candidate a sneak preview of a new feature you’re working on or talk through the most exciting upcoming projects so they finish the day feeling excited about your future momentum. We asked engineers using Triplebyte what caused them to have bad experiences during onsite interviews. Almost all the replies centered on their interactions with the interviewers. The top three complaints were interviewers being (1) unprepared and not knowing anything about them (2) not being familiar with the technical questions they asked and (3) being determined to prove their intelligence to the interviewee. It’s unlikely an engineer will accept your offer if they had a bad interaction with an interviewer. I’d make the importance of providing a good interview experience a part of your company culture. You can start by writing a simple interviewing guide for your team that emphasizes the importance of being on-time, prepared and friendly when interviewing. You can also only pick the engineers who are friendliest and best at representing your company as interviewers. For question familiarity, have a centralized question bank that interviewers work through together before using them on candidates. For more ideas on the kind of content and questions you can use in technical interviews, my co-founder Ammon wrote a detailed post on how to interview engineers. It’s also great to do something that makes lunch a chance for the candidate to get to know the team. At Triplebyte we Slack our team in the morning that a candidate is interviewing and ask people to head over to the lunch table at the same time. Our office manager introduces the candidate to the team and we do an icebreaker where the candidate gets to ask a question which everyone goes around and answers (we tell them to think of this ahead of time and make it lighthearted). It’s a good way for them to get to know the team and is usually quite fun. We’ve had candidates tell us this experience was the deciding factor in joining. After a successful onsite you’ll make the formal offer and the work to get it accepted really starts. The first step is making sure you actually present the offer details. A complaint we hear from Triplebyte candidates is being asked how likely they would be to accept an offer before knowing the actual offer details. The reality is that compensation details are a large factor in where people decide to work and you can’t expect someone to know if they want to work for you without giving them that data. Create a formal offer letter template that includes these details: Equity When presenting the offer I’d recommend doing things in the following order: Step One: Call to tell them they’ll be receiving an offer Have the hiring manager (if you’re early stage that’s the founder) call the candidate as soon as possible after the onsite. Do it the same day if you can. Tell them the day went really well and you’d love to make them an offer to join the team. Mention specific reasons why you’re excited about them joining the team and reference what they did well during the day. You could even have multiple people on the call and ask each of them to mention a specific reason they’d be excited to work with the candidate. Tell them the next step will be you (or a recruiter) calling them back to talk through offer details. Step Two: Call with offer details Call the next day to talk them through the offer details. Explaining salary and benefits is fairly straightforward. For equity, before giving any details, ask them how familiar they are with equity concepts like stock options or RSUs. Tell them you’ll be sending through the formal offer letter, documenting all these details, via email shortly. They should take some time to digest that and the next step would be a follow up call to talk through their thoughts. Offer some times for that call right then. It’s tempting to push hard for a decision on this call. I’d recommend not doing that to avoid the candidate feeling pressured. This will make it harder for you to stay engaged with them as they go through the decision making process. It’s fine to ask them if they have any initial thoughts or questions and then move on if they seem hesitant to go into details. It is also ok to ask them about their decision making timeline if you haven’t discussed that already. Now the offer has been presented it’s time to focus on closing. To be effective at closing candidates you need to work hard at selling them on the most exciting reasons to join. This sounds obvious but there is a temptation to stop if the candidate doesn’t seem immediately excited or asks probing questions about your business. The reality is that working at your company will seem more exciting to you than the candidate because you’ve had time and data to build up that excitement. Now you have to pull out all the stops to transfer that excitement. It’s common at this stage for candidates to start probing more deeply into questions about your company culture. They’re trying to build a picture of what it will be like to work with you on a daily basis. We’ve observed at Triplebyte that most companies use fairly generic descriptions of their culture. This is optimal for not offending candidates but won’t make your company stand out. To use your culture as a differentiator you’ll need to take some risk. You could try describing your culture with tradeoffs e.g. don’t just say you’re “collaborative”, say you’re willing to trade the upside of collaboration (better ideas and execution) for the downsides (reduced personal autonomy to just do things). Depending on the content you choose, being different in describing your culture could backfire or it could give you a hiring advantage with the right candidates. Whichever approach you take, make sure you and your team are prepared to talk in detail about this with candidates. Sounding unprepared about culture is itself a negative signal about how much the company cares about and values its team. Make sure to get your team involved in the closing process. Ask everyone who met the candidate during the onsite to send them a follow up email with specific reasons they enjoyed it and offering to talk with them again. If you’re small it’s ok if this is literally the entire company. If you have multiple teams and you already know which team the candidate would be working on, make sure that team reaches out. Encourage them to talk about the details of what the first two weeks would look like and who would help get them ramped up. Nitty gritty details will make the offer feel more real and we’ve seen this be the deciding factor for candidates. If you’re early stage, include your investors in every engineering offer you make. Then become selective as you grow and the hiring pace picks up. Choose the investor you think will be most likely to effectively sell that candidate and give the candidate context on why you thought that in the intro email. Don’t pick an investor who isn’t up to date and familiar with the details about your company. Also think about more than just closing the candidate. Think about their personal circumstances and other decision makers involved. The best recruiters we work with at Triplebyte are continually taking notes about this and referring back to them to take action. I’ve seen a great recruiter learn early on that the candidate’s wife was reluctant to move location because she was worried it’d negatively impact her medical career. The recruiter spent time researching places she could work, gathered contact information and compensation data, and asked to speak with the wife to share it. The candidate accepted the offer shortly afterwards. What matters most during the closing process is how long its been since your last communication with the candidate. You need to strike a balance between proactively following up without being overbearing. It’s good to find reasons to reach out again that aren’t asking “have you decided yet?” even if you both know what the real agenda is. For example you could send them links to recent news stories you think they’d be interested in based on what you learnt about them during the onsite. If you’re doing team events send them an invitation to join. Your goal is to stay near the top of their mind as they’re deciding but not suffocate them. One tactic companies use for closing is putting an aggressive deadline on the offer e.g. we need a final decision within a week. I’d advise against this because good candidates with multiple options will push back. It’s also something an experienced recruiter at a competing company can use as ammunition against you. If a candidate tells them about your deadline they might respond well I’d question the culture that company is trying to build if they only want to hire people who can decide quickly. We want everyone to be sure this is the best place for them over the long term and would never pressure someone into rushing their decision. A softer version you can try is an expiring signing bonus. We’ve seen this be effective and have used it ourselves with success at Triplebyte. The way I’d present this would be We want you to take all the time you need to make the right decision for you (and your family). At the same time we can’t leave offers hanging out there indefinitely as things can change rapidly at a startup. If you are able to make a final decision by X date, we’d be able to offer you a $X,000 signing bonus. There are two common scenarios that present unique closing challenges – competing against big companies (Facebook and Google especially) and candidates considering relocation to the Bay Area. I’ll talk through some advice on handling both. As a startup it’s hard to compete with Facebook and Google compensation packages, especially for senior engineers. Unless you’re also a public company, you won’t be able to compete on total compensation. Still, you can win – we’ve seen startups successfully compete against them on Triplebyte. These are the arguments we’ve found are most successful: For candidates who would need to relocate to the Bay Area, they may be frightened by the cost of living, which has both increased in dollars and frequency of press coverage. While this is ultimately a personal decision for the candidate I have been surprised by how often even engineers don’t take an analytical approach to running the numbers to be sure what their actual cost of living would be. You can be proactive about this. Don’t assume that when a candidate says they don’t think they can afford to live in the Bay Area that they’ve run through the numbers. If you really want them to join then spend time helping them think through this. You can create a spreadsheet template with cost of living assumptions and work through this together with them to figure out what their real monthly income would be. We also wrote a blog post talking through the pros and cons in detail that you could share. No company has a 100% offer acceptance rate and you will inevitably miss out on closing candidates you really wanted. That’s an inevitable part of hiring and it sucks. Use every rejected offer as an opportunity to gather data on how you can improve your hiring process and pitch. Do a quick exit interview with each candidate and ask for feedback on why they made the decision and their general feedback on the quality of your hiring process. Review these regularly with your team and use them to iterate and improve your interviewing and closing process over time. If you treat optimizing this process like you would optimizing your product you will see improved conversions and have more success hiring. Good luck! If you’re hiring engineers and would like to try Triplebyte, use this link to sign up and you’ll get a special $15,000 hiring fee for your first hire Categories Other Posts Harj is a Group Partner at YC. He was cofounder and CEO of Triplebyte (S15), which helps great engineers find work at the fastest growing companies in the world with the least amount of time & effort.Convincing Engineers to Join Your Team
Speed
First Call
Technical Phone Screen
Onsite Interview
Making The Offer
Culture
Closing
Exploding Offers
Big Company Competition and Bay Area Relocation
Feedback and Iterate
Author
Harj Taggar