👋 Howdy! This is the Open Source CEO, the bi-weekly newsletter that elevates your leadership game.

COMING IN HOT TODAY 🔥 

♻️ Goterra's green warrior: Olympia Yarger talks trash transformation.
🎙 Blockbuster fires back: Only 20 years too late.
🏔 Running a board meeting: A take away guide for the perfect meeting.
📨 Outbound tech: Your recommendation for the week.

If you’re interested in sponsoring these emails, reach out. I’d love to share some ideas and see how we can work together.

PARTNERS 💫 

INTRODUCTION 🤷‍♂️

In today’s startup and technology landscape - there is a lot of sameness. A sea of indistinguishable B2B tools, web3 spin-offs, crypto boondoggles, and e-commerce me-toos. Even just yesterday I saw a startup announce a raise that was helping us shop better.

Not something I thought we needed help with in 2023 to be honest.

So at least to me, it’s refreshing when I see someone taking the proverbial deep tech bull by the horns and build something of substance. Real substance.

And that’s Olympia Yarger. Olympia and her team at Goterra are building, what seems to be a circular waste economy. Their insect farms convert food waste into sustainable protein and fertiliser. It’s a brilliantly sustainable solution.

Another company I have great respect for that is building a real deep tech masterpiece is Vow: a food company is working on creating a variety of sustainable, cell-based meats (famous for the mammoth meatball).

But enough from me, here without further ado, I present you with the wonderful Olympia Yarger.

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Olympia Yarger - Founder & CEO at Goterra

Olympia Yarger is the CEO and Founder of Goterra, a Canberra-based waste management infrastructure company. She is a founding director of the Insect Protein Association of Australia and has been a significant leader in the development of the industry globally.

Her work was recognised when a new species of fly discovered by the CSIRO was named after her. (First person I know I can say this about.)

She was awarded KPMG's Australian Tech Innovator of 2022 and was named the ACT Australian of the Year 2023. Pretty impressive stuff to say the least!

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

I am still on the floor with the team while setting the vision and direction of Goterra. Identifying our opportunities, talent gaps, setting our goals and guidance for the team to get us there.

Every day, I focus on building an autonomous team of leaders to deliver on our ambitious goals. I drive the teams to be focusing on execution across all facets of their work. At the moment this means documentation, process and leading our commitment to each other and the task at hand.

Explain your philosophy around leadership? How do you think about it?

I have adapted some of my leadership tenants from my time working with the US military. Here are the values and philosophies we live by at Goterra:

1. Leaders eat last - I believe that leaders should give first to the team and then to themselves. If the team is having a late night, I expect the leader to be there with them.

2. Radical candour saves lives - Speak your truth, hear from your team, be a participant in the discussion not a bystander.

3. Honesty over pride - That’s not a blanket get out of jail free card. But you will not get in trouble for telling the truth.

4. Own your stuff - I’m impressed by people who take charge of their corner of the world and passionately apply themselves to owning it.

5. We are in this boat together - You cannot say you are removed from failure just because you weren’t the person who made the error. Any failure is ours. Any win is ours. We are not alone.

As we scale and more people join the team we hold our core mission and values but the culture inevitably evolves and I welcome that. We are made up of a team of forward-thinkers and contrarians who need to create their own opportunities so our leadership tenets evolve too so that Goterra can realise real outcomes.

How do you build culture?

We are lucky in the sense that a strong sense of purpose in mitigating emissions to solve for the climate is core to our business. For this reason, a lot of our people want to join Goterra. That helps unite us as we are from many disciplines - from technology & robotics to agriculture & fabrication.

We know that our people are our greatest asset. Our culture keeps us purposeful, focused and inspired. We have five values and ten tenets which are the foundation of who we are. We try to always put culture first because if we get this right our team will feel supported and empowered. The further away from HQ the harder it is to maintain culture in a way that is consistent to the mission and purpose of the organisation.

Scaling any team is difficult. One of the things we care most about is culture. Alongside our customer, is where we put most of our attention - understanding our customer and retaining and scaling our culture.

Detail your recruitment strategy. How do you hire all-star talent?

Diversity of skills and backgrounds has always been a priority for us. We balance the tension of ideas & perspectives to drive exceptional innovation & commercialisation. Our team has a diverse range of skills, experiences, qualifications and backgrounds. And it's a focus of ours to integrate this diversity into every process and system in our technology, to deliver a new service, driving rapid growth.

Overall, we look for people who enjoy complex problem solving. These sound generic as a lot of people may classify themselves in this way. But, we’ve learned that often people don’t have these capabilities autonomously. Only in a group with many others surrounding them for support can we achieve this.

We’re looking for the tenacious, the contrarian the people who are looking for agency over their role. As a result Goterra’s workforce is 37% people working with a disability or who are neurodivergent. To make that true we started in the easy places - creating permission to apply. We added language to our job descriptions that explained we’re open to minorities & people with disabilities applying.

From here we looked at our hiring process, were there places where we were making it hard for people to be included because they were different?

We included options for written answers to interview questions instead of verbal. And, sending the questions in advance. That way people can prepare and be ready, which is important for non-neurotypical people & those with learning disabilities.

As we learned more we added other vignettes to this process. For example; entry level females progressed through the entire hiring process, regardless of the final outcome.

We know that women in STEM are less likely to make it to the final interview and so often are more nervous and anxious about their performance. We created opportunities for women to experience the interview process and be encouraged by the progress. And it works!

Women who get a second interview perform much better than their first interview. We’ve hired some terrific staff who may have not moved through to the second interview if we’d not created this pathway.

I want to be clear that it can feel like more work to have a diverse team. You have to pay more attention to communication and you have to work on creating the right engagement with tools and management. This is not easy to do when you’re also managing a startup. When you work with people who are like you, have the same cultural background and are neurotypical you can get away with lazy communication and instruction.

Generally, people will just ‘figure it out’. You can’t do that if your team is truly diverse. You’ve got to do better and make sure the team is evolving and improving. We’re still figuring this out and we still get things wrong. But over all, Goterra is a better and far less boring place to work because of this value.

How do you set goals?

We set OKRs quarterly. The goal of our OKRs is to connect company, team and personal objectives in a hierarchical way to measurable results. Helping us work together in one unified direction. A big part of OKRs is making sure each individual knows what's expected of them at work. OKRs are public, in front of everyone, so people and teams move towards the same goals and know what others are focusing on.

We start by defining 3-5 key objectives on company, team or personal levels. Objectives should be ambitious, qualitative, time bound and actionable by the person or team. We find it keeps us accountable within our own teams, and helps with cross-team collaboration and understanding.

Do you run hybrid, on-site or remote and why?

Our waste operators, farm production people and service technicians need to work on site due to the nature of their roles. We have people employed in these positions across Canberra, Albury-Wodonga, Sydney and Melbourne. For the rest of the team we are 100% flexible depending on the role and project.

Our HR/Head of People works full time remotely from Western Australia. And we have a number of people who choose hybrid and others who work 100% onsite or home by choice.

Communication and inclusion are key, we work asynchronously using Slack as our main communication tool, and all discussions are documented in channels so no-one misses out on the conversation. We have team-building activities online and in-person, and our remote team members are encouraged and supported to spend regular time at our HQ in Canberra, with Canberra based team members regularly travelling to our satellite sites.

Being flexible with how and where work is performed also means that we can prioritise inclusion and diversity which we believe is integral to our success. And as I spend a lot of time travelling for Goterra, my own role needs to be a hybrid of remote and on-site, and model that it can work successfully if the commitment to making it work is there.

And that's it! Connect with Olympia on LinkedIn, and keep an eye on Goterra’s LinkedIn for updates on their new facility opening June 2023.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Shots fired. Better late than never.

TOOLS & RESOURCES 🔥

Want to know what what Craft Ventures, David Sacks (not to be confused with Springfield Nuclear Power Plant Softball Team second baser, Steve Sax) uses to run a successful Board Meeting?

If the answer is yes, GREAT! Click the image below to be taken to the 26-page Google Slide you can copy and edit for yourself.

EXTRA READING: If you want go super deep, here is a phenomenal blog post doing a deep dive on the above format: The SaaS Board Meeting by David Sacks.

TECH RECOMMENDATION 💾

Head onto social media and you will find loads of VP of Sales, Chief Revenue Officers and other sales leaders talking about how cold email is dead.

It’s not. They just aren’t doing it well.

At Athyna we send 80k (not a typo) outbound emails a day with <2% spam rate. It is one of our secret weapons.

To do it, we have Apollo - Find, contact, and close your ideal buyers with over 265M contacts and streamlined engagement workflows powered by AI.

There are a number of tools in the stack you need to do cold outbound well but Apollo is one of our absolute go-to’s.

ASK ME ANYTHING 🗣

I want to be a trusted resource for you. If you think anything I know in relation to brand, culture, global teams, sales and growth would help you unblock a problem in you weeks shoot me a line.

Ask in the comments or reply to this email and I will do my best to answer it in a future edition. 🙌🏼

That's it my lovelies. I hope it was valuable. I have one ask though: tell me what you thought of today's edition.

Also, feel free to reply to this email and spill your thoughts in a deeper more personal way as I'd love to hear from you.

See you next week. ✌️