transforming into the HR sponge in San Francisco <<??>>

I know that everyone already knows that, whether it is the most talented candidate on my screen, my allergist, a friend from my childhood, random postman, somebody else's old grandma waiting for a bus next to me, but it just feels tremendous to be part of such a great company as productboard is ??

To exemplify my great luck I am going to share my story about tripling my network in Silicon Valley.

So a few weeks back I just grabbed my laptop and my little hipster backpack and flew over the ocean to our San Francisco's office. I was super excited as this was my first time in North America (and I made sure that every single person I met there is aware of that??).

The most essential purpose of the travelling was to become a little sponge that can learn, get inspired, absorb all the possible information from the most enchanting Silicon Valley leaders and the most important to get to know every single mate in person in our American office. And I am extremely delighted that I made this happen. ??

I joined productboard as employee number 26 (I think??). That time I honestly did not expect what is ahead of us. I knew it is gonna be a thrilling ride. But not such a life-changing one. I only wanted to hang out, be around and work with those brilliantly smart and very quiet geeks. I played with a thought to learn how to programme by myself to have at least one little thing in common with the absolute rocking hackers because their languages ruby, python, javascript, typescript or go were just something so much out of my space and made me constantly curious and my myelin thirsty!

So that time, I had no clue that we are going to be so close from becoming the real startup unicorn. I would be so blown away if anyone tells me about reaching 86 teammates in the upcoming ten months and that Forbes will constantly mention us ??. Moreover, that my grandma will proudly read about us even though she cannot ever understand the agile principles neither what is it my real responsibility as she remembers very well me struggling when dividing by three cyphers number at my primary school.

But back to my San Francisco trip! ??

I wanted to be as prepared as I can so I can make the most of it! Our kindest and most humble CEO and VP helped me with the introduction to our investors so I could search for the best practices and build a community around. I have met many excellent and experienced recruiters from Google, Facebook, also the partner of Kleiner and Perkins Jackie Xu - absolute rockstar with recruiting experience from Twitter, but I will talk about that in the next episode or charming vice president Erik Kriessmann from Index Venture. I went to various meetups focusing on the current Silicon Valleys challenges of people ops - for example, one was organized by CultureAmp and hosted at the office of Eventbrite. I have met million of People Ops Analyst while realizing how crucial it is to be Data-driven in HR. We talk a lot about how to work with data you collect with your quarterly engagement survey, how to drive a decision after that, how to empower your team leaders and managers to take the actions.

????This is me and Jackie Xu taking our selfie. She is the prettiest partner from Kleiner Perkins. What a rock star! She walked me through her thrilling story, as a young recruiter from Facebook, a board games fellow player went to a Twitter event, with a very sneaky intention to hire some of their developers. In the end, one of the developers actually hired her to Twitter. And now, she is sharing the best of the best practices with the coolest companies from the Kleiner and Perkins portfolio (for example productboard ?? or Dropbox, Slack, Spotify, Google, Amazon etc.)

The most curious Terka of your life ??

Before meeting with anyone inspiring, I sent them all a bunch of topics I was about to ask, and I wanted to focus on at least three days ahead. This was pretty appreciated by my hosts and they always told me that it's fantastic how prepared I was and they could think through all the areas I wanted them to cover before, so it was the most efficient ever. Well, actually it would be if my mac keyboard works and I am able to write down the notes. ?????♀?

After every meeting, I sent the follow-up email, and I called it "Thank you note ??", and I wrote down a bunch of the topics we went through, action points and a summary. If we agreed on the next session (even when I am back and it is via Zoom Call) I scheduled the follow-up meetup, I also asked for the references and introduction to some other inspiring people (to meet or hire ??) in their network.

And I honestly think that one day in San Francisco must have at least 63 hours minimum! In one day not only I tripled my whole network but I could wake up really early, went for a running by the beach, went to our office at the famous Market Street and hopped on some screen calls with Czech candidates, went for few meetings with bunch of local Silicon Valley high speed recruiters, went for one awesome swim on my break?????♀?, appeared at a cool people geek meetup where we talked about empowering managers to take action and drive a change hosted by Eventbrite???? And that was really cool. We are actually just implementing CultureAmp to start with our performance reviews, engagement surveys, 360 feedbacks and competency matrixes follow!

With our beloved productboard we sponsored the conference ProductCraft and that was pretty awesome as I had the opportunity to shadow our supermen from sales, Conor and Michael and meet many of our current or future ?? customers. I happened to talk with a senior product manager from Spotify, who excitedly shared his story coming from a developer to a product manager role and now we can have him another lovely guest for our future meetup in Prague. I was also thrilled to chat about just right amount of vacay with Dan Olsen who is the author of our favourite book Lean Startup.

????this is Nikhil Tibrewal, Senior Product Manager from Spotify sharing a story with me about his journey from a product developer to a product manager!

ProductCraft was a great conference in a new format with outstanding content and speakers, for example, Jeetu Patel, Benjamin Earl Evans Design Lead from Airbnb, Maiken Hansen the head of product from Amazon, Jen Dante Head of product from Square and million others! I absolutely loved the venue too as we were located at one of the most magical places in SF - Palace of Fine Arts Theatre. 

Then we hosted our first happy hour meetup in the SF office together with our newest and loveliest event manager Milan ?? We sent the invite to everyone we know, or we met at the conference. Once the event started, we made sure that everyone is very well looked after, our teammates were as always ready to guide everyone through a demo or make the beloved guest falling in love with productboard. The event like this with pretty good insights to the company is one of the best sources when you are hiring! Approved a million times, so we are looking forward to hosting others and other ones!

Me and Cori drawing the favourite animals on our attendees' name badges. And then I could not figure out how do I draw the narwhal for christ sake!

You only realize how easy is to become a part of SF community thanks to the super driven and energetic environment, I have never ever experienced that anywhere else, even though I lived in London for almost 2 years, my current network from these 2 weeks is almost 3 times wider!

I was so blown away when I was just crossing a park and the first couple on a bench were passionately discussing OKRs, two young gentlemen next to them were debating about the benefits of programming in Go. I just naturally wanted to talk to everyone about everything I was reading about the last 11 months. And I could even talk to the authors of these books, I met the author Lean the product.

And everyone was widely open to bring me in any discussion. One thing that is real though is that in one day you have to experience million of decision paralysis as you need to decide should you go to meetup in Google/Slack/Facebook or for a dinner with a cool designer from Dropbox and finally taste that super Invisible burger, Tonys pizza, and Sushirrito that everyone heavenly singing about. Omg, I just loved that so much! What a lovely geeky place.

All of this went above my sweetest American dream. Now sitting on the plane, heavier about like 678946 pages of the most precious notes from every single inspiring day.

I am sure we can be spreading SF vibes to the community in Prague and back, once all the team will be rotating and using our San Francisco apartment properly (look at the views)!

You will realize how crucial but also easy peasy is to build the network and community around your mission. It's like having the superpower!

And you know what! You can be a part of this adventure. Do you want to grow, do you want to expand your network about absolute talent stars from the coolest companies in Silicon Valley? We can help you to make this dream come true. productboard helped me and my dreams went far away above my expectation. One month ago, I honestly thought that the American dream is just so overrated. I do not believe it now and I am here, happy to help you to get there too! If this is something that resonates with you, you are brave, curious, the most energetic in this world, and you know that you can help us to build the team that matters, you can join our team and apply for a talent scout or a recruiter!

We would love to grab one or two Maté Maté ?? (our favourite boosting drinks) and talk to you more about our fabulous and the most exciting journey! ??