Unlocking the Secret to Building a High-Performing Startup

For over a decade, I have been fortunate to lead and manage small and large teams across North America and International regions like Japan, S.Korea, Germany, France, UK, and India, across various organizations that I have worked for. Through all of those incredible opportunities, I unknowingly ended up fulfilling a passion of mine - being a teacher. My experiences have had me at the forefront of many dynamic industry shifts like my time at Zuora where I witness the boom of the Subscription Economy where traditional business models came down crashing and gave rise to our modern SaaS tech world. Then my time at Productiv where, "Software [was] eating the world," (which was a comment made by Marc Andreessen in a 2011 The Wall Street Journal article) and we had to find a solution to get back to driving productivity from our SaaS applications vs. it being treated as a cost liability on balance sheets. And, then again at my time at Applied Intuition, which is navigating the fascinating world of autonomous vehicle technology, pushing the boundaries of innovation, and transforming the way we perceive transportation. And interestingly enough, the ONE thing that I can point to as a key to my success across all these experiences is the PEOPLE - The People whom I have been fortunate to hire, build with, grow, and grow with. But as we all know, just hiring great people is not the solution to building great teams and great companies.?

In DJ Khaled's famous phrase ... The "Major Key??" is actually enabling these incredibly talented people.?

I've known this concept throughout my years of leading teams, and I've always prided myself on being a teacher and mentor. But only a few years ago, I came to think about this from a completely different perspective, which really helped me unlock that Major Key. It was the experience of becoming a first-time father about three years ago that enriched my perspective on leadership and unlocking the secret of building high-performing teams leading to building heavily scaling businesses. It helped me unveil new strategies and opportunities to empower my teams and excel as an executive.

My almost 3-year-old son is constantly in learning mode, while I?am always in teaching mode trying to give access to my son - access to equipment like books or a snowboard, access to coaching like swimming expertise, access to new experiences like the Zoo or the Science Museum. Witnessing my son's insatiable curiosity and boundless capacity for learning and my passion for teaching, I found inspiration in his ability to absorb everything around him.?

I constantly give him room to learn, operate, and make mistakes.?

This prompted me to reevaluate my approach to leadership, seeking ways to translate the invaluable lessons of parenthood into strategies that would enable my teams to flourish.?

I recognize the core principles of parenting as nurturing growth, fostering a supportive environment, and providing the right tools and continuous guidance. These principles have been incredibly useful for me in teaching my son to snowboard at the young age of 18 months where he is now shredding the slopes and does not need his "Da Da." Nevertheless, I’ve also found them to be very relevant in my professional life, especially when it comes to unlocking my team’s full potential.?

In both of my last companies, as the Go-To-Market leader, I had to hire large teams as soon as I entered the business and I had to make them effective because 'new ARR' was our North-Star metric as it is for any high-growth startup. My new learnings as a Dad made me bring a big teaching concept to my teams. Most people when they join a company are excited, motivated, and hungry to get started. Especially salespeople, CS folks, and respective team leaders because much of their compensation relies on closing deals, acquiring new business, retaining customers, and creating upsell opportunities for the company. Startups have to be frugal in order to succeed, but I learned through my experience as a Dad that you cannot be overly frugal that it leaves a crippling experience on the learning ability of your child to learn and adopt new things in life.

Most startups don’t invest heavily upfront in their people onboarding and continuous training. (What I am talking about is very different from your standard HR onboarding where you learn all the company values and have your anti-corruption training sessions). I was bringing highly talented and successful people into the company through rigorous interview processes, but I quickly noticed that I didn't have a buttoned-up plan to enable them in order to be successful in the 'most productive period' of 2 weeks since them starting a company. This was a miss.?

A big miss!

This is where I drew parallels between being a first-time dad and being a teacher for my son to set up a similar framework of quick but continuous learning. It came down to arming highly capable people with the right tools, a proven structure, and tailored learning material for them to be immediately successful or let's say "dangerous". The way to do this was not by immediately building a massive onboarding/training team (although I later realized building an initial core team to help drive this initiative will provide critical ROI) but to build a very structured and tailored program which drove measurable KPIs. I was able to set up a highly successful model which helped me achieve exponential ARR scale in a very short time in my last two companies - we scaled ARR by 12x in the first one into double-digit millions in 24 months, and then in my most recent gig, where we scaled ARR by 3x into triple-digit million in just 12 months. We did this with a skeleton team of a revenue ops partner, some of my top leaders, and reps where we worked backward from the outcomes we wanted and then built an entire program around it.

Let me share a bit of what this onboarding program actually looked like: I established a rigorous two-week punctilious onboarding program throwing your new hire into the deep end while providing a structure of constant support from management, teammates, and a dedicated "buddy."

This way your new hire is still "drinking through the firehose" but not gasping for air.

In the two weeks, the entire onboarding program is transcribed into calendar form, which makes it effortless for him or her; the meetings are orchestrated with an agenda of topics that are discussed in each meeting along with questions that are asked/answered, outcomes, goals, and shared learnings. The program is thoughtful and sequential, so the new hire isn't lost in terms of whom to meet and who best can answer a question. It is orchestrated in a mechanical way but is constructed to feel organic in terms of blending into a new organization, meeting other employees, and building relationships.

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid." - Albert Einstein

My son is a visual and auditory learner, so I have it good because I get to teach via both methods. One of the most significant revelations I had was the importance of tailoring learning experiences for each team member, just as I had done with my son. Hence developing a tailored onboarding program that fits all is difficult but important. My OKRs were simply aimed at getting my people "dangerous" enough in 2 weeks to get in front of an executive of a prospective company or customer and have a sophisticated value add conversation where both parties learn something meaningful pertaining.

Some of these personalized training initiatives included:

• Initial testing to understand the baseline of the individual coming into the company so they can be guided to the right onboarding and training material
• Role-specific workshops and seminars to address unique challenges and hone relevant skills very specific to the outputs that you are expecting out of the individuals, managers, and teams
• Experience-specific workshops to ensure folks with rich experience in one area are not fed basic training (which would devalue the entire training content for them)
• Mentorship programs: pairing team members with experienced professionals across all functions for guidance and support - e.g. think manager mentorship (pairing a handful of first-time FLMs with a tenured VP who can share his or her experiences as a leader)
• Periodic check-ins and highly tailored feedback sessions to ensure alignment, outcomes, and address any concerns often
• Customized e-learning courses and resources for self-paced skill development
• Each training program has to have a test and scoring mechanism to understand (i) if your training program continues to have a high bar, (ii) if your team is taking it seriously and performing well against it

After the initial 2 week gauntlet, it’s all about continuous learning; my son forgets things - he forgot how to how to speak numbers from 1 to 10 in Spanish and Hindi, although he knew it well at some point, so I had to reinforce this every morning when dropping him at his Montessori. I would make him repeat the numbers in the different languages on the 5-min drive and soon enough it all came back, and he's got it now! In the same way, I built training programs for my AEs, Sales Engineers, Sales Leaders, Marketing Team Members, and even VPs to have continuous learning. A good example is training first-time First Line Managers (FLM) who have never done that particular job before but are highly capable and eager. Having a continuous training program that reinforces the right learnings can really empower the FLMs to perform at their peak capacity.?

I have seen the reverse as well, where highly capable FLMs fail miserably as they move from their IC roles into first-time management, receive poor training, and are left on their own to figure out their path forward. This is one of the biggest mistakes a startup can make as they have now only lost their best-performing IC, but converted them into a poorly performing manager - that is a direct negative impact on future ARR. ?

Proficiency comes through continuous learning. Examples of these continuous learning initiatives include:

• Consistent testing to understand the standard baseline of the team and the individual
• Monthly product-specific training sessions to keep the team updated on the latest features and enhancements
• Regular customer-case study training to illustrate how new customers are getting value out of the solution and how to leverage it for new business
• Regular value and pricing workshops for the GTM team to sharpen their negotiation skills and understanding of the market and customer challenges
• Quarterly soft skills development programs, focusing on communication, collaboration, problem-solving, and value delivery
• Quarterly company-wide knowledge-sharing sessions to promote cross-functional learning and collaboration?

"The most important thing is to try and inspire people so that they can be great in whatever they want to do" - Kobe Bryant

The lessons gleaned from parenthood continue to inspire me as I strive to create a nurturing, supportive, and high-performing professional environment for my teams. By integrating these principles into my leadership style, I am confident that we can foster a culture of support, growth, and excellence.

I invite you to share your personal experiences and how they have shaped your leadership style and professional growth or let me know if you've used other strategies to build high-performing teams and building achieving exponential ARR growth.?

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