Revenue Data + Culture Done Right

An interview with Alexa Grabell, co-founder & CEO at Pocus. šŸ”®

šŸ‘‹ Howdy to the 560 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 42,548 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS šŸ“š

If youā€™re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

šŸš€ The Philosophy, Traditions & Leadership Behind Winning Culture. A follow up in interview with Dom Pym, co-founder & ex-CEO at Up.
šŸ¤ Building Sales Teams, Scaling Startups & Personal Branding. An interview with Scott Leese, Fractional CRO & GTM Advisor.
šŸŸ The Future Of Technology Belongs To One Man, Jensen Huang. Co-Founder, President & CEO of Nvidia. The man holding all the chips.

PARTNERS šŸ’«

ā€œWe need a front-end developer for Tuesday, but it will take months to find someone in the US.ā€ If you are looking for your next remote hire, Athyna has you covered. From finance and ops, to creative and engineering.

The secret weapon for ambitious startups. No search fees. No activation fees. Just incredible talent, matched with AI precisionā€”at lightning speed. All up up to 70% less than hiring locally.

Interested in sponsoring these emails? See our partnership options here.

HOUSEKEEPING šŸ“Ø

Big day and night for me. Just arriving back to Australia to get the ball rolling on some family stuff I have going on. The trip from Argentina to Australia is not for the faint of heart. I am not one for selfies but I took this mirror airport selfie just for you readers. Not that you wanted or needed it.

Nothing more to add today. I think I am delirious. I need sleep. Hope you enjoy this one!

LEADER OF THE WEEK šŸŽ™

Alexa Grabell - Co-Founder & CEO at Pocus

Alexa Grabell is the co-founder and CEO of Pocus, a revenue data platform purpose-built for go-to-market teams. Pocus helps analyse, visualise and action data to improve customer acquisition, conversion, and expansionā€”without relying on engineers.

Alexa and Pocus work with companies like Miro, Webflow, Loom, and Superhuman, with backing from First Round Capital, Coatue, GTM Fund, and executives from Datadog, Notion, Figma and more. Alexaā€™s passion for democratising data began when she led sales strategy & operations at Dataminr, where she built internal solutions to power sales teams with data.

Alexa Grabell.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

As CEO, my job boils down to a few key things that I spend the most time thinking about, first, is setting the short term and long term vision and mission for the company as a whole. Next is for me to sell that vision to customers, investor, and our team. While also, helping drive that tactically by supporting key projects across product, marketing, or sales.

The job of CEO is also to step into any role that needs a leader. For me today, that leadership role is sales. Spending time first as both the only seller at Pocus and now sales leader to four Account Executives I deeply understand what it takes to be in this role and better understand the ideal candidate to replace myself.

My calendar day-to-day looks like a lot of meetings with some carved out focus time to think about the important strategic questions.

I try and block my days to minimize context switching, for example, I do all my calls with direct reports on the same day back to back.

A typical slate of calls every week might include; meetings with leads and prospects, catching up with with existing customers, internal team calls, Pocus community events and some investors relations. A typical Friday is back to back and usually includes at least one scheduling conflict.

How do you build culture?

I think one of the most important things is to set clear values. The process for creating values should be ever-evolving. The first set of values were solely built by my co-founder and I, the version we have now was created by the team.

At our first offsite we wrote down what made each member of the team uniquely good at what they did - we synthesized the takeaways into our values. One of our most recent hires said something during her interview process that really stuck with me: ā€œI can tell all of you genuinely like each other.ā€

Sending vibes.

When hiring, we very intentionally screen for culture in the interview process. Every role has a culture interview where we are screening for these values. We also use the opportunity to explicitly share what itā€™s like working at Pocus, how these values manifest so thereā€™s mutual alignment.

By doing this we set clear expectations on how we work as a company to embody those values. We built an extensive how WE work and how YOU work guide in Notion that we send to employees before they join so theres strong alignment on expectations.

More vibes.

Itā€™s important also to fire fast for culture mis-alignment. Itā€™s tempting to just let culture misalignment slide, especially if the hire is great at what they do - this is dangerous at any size. If you want a strong culture, you have to reinforce values.

And we reward the team often. Specifically those members embodying what makes our culture great. We call these value awards and we give them out monthly during all hands. We also encourage the entire team to post in our #kudos channel in Slack to highlight these wins.

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

Our process is simple. First, for every role we look at our networks firstā€”VCs, friends of Pocus, employeesā€”we offer a bonus to Pocus employeesā€”this is our best way to find great talent, fast.

While we are doing this marketing helps promote the role on our social channels. Our hiring posts are some of the best performing on LinkedIn. Something we are super proud of! Once we find the potential hires we move into out interview process which looks like the following.

First we use a ā€˜Jobs To Be Doneā€™ framework to build a clear scorecard for each role. This removes ambiguity from the interview loop. We are also careful to make sure everyoneā€™s voice is heard from the interview processā€”various of personas should be part of the interview loop. Itā€™s helpful to get a gut check cross departments.

An example of said scorecard.

We also like to use take home tests during the interview process. This is in order to test a few things. Weā€™re big into documentation. If you canā€™t articulate your ideas clearly in written form, Pocus will be a hard place to work. Weā€™re early-stage, so we need do-ers. If someone is unwilling to spend a couple of hours on a take-home chances are theyā€™ll struggle to do in the weeds work.

Pocus offsite #1.

Pocus offsite #2.

Weā€™re not just asking for answers also, but rather we want you to show us how you think. It can be hard to really understand how someone thinks in an interview. How each candidate might answer the same questions with the same context differently gives you a window into how they reason. Finally we make sure to never lower the barā€”we much rather hire slowly rather than hire the wrong person.

On perseverance

ā€œYou know you business better than anyone, including the VCs youā€™re talking to. I think itā€™s important that founders remember that, so they donā€™t get beat by VCs telling you your thesis is wrong.

As a startup founder, your job is to see the future, and you are going to do something that most people donā€™t believe in. You just have to feel so much confidence in yourself, and the idea that you can make that future happen. Regardless of if other people believe you or not.ā€

ā€” Alexa Grabell

How do you set goals?

The North Star for our company gets set once or twice per year. This then informs how we set quarterly and monthly OKRs. Based on the North Star we set monthly OKRs. This may seem too frequent but as a startup things are often moving to quickly. Quarterly OKRs might keep us stuck doing the wrong things for too long. Weā€™re constantly experimenting, learning, and iterating.

For us itā€™s important to tie each OKR to a team and an owner on the leadership team, be that marketing, product, CS, sales, engineering. Once we have our OKRs we review them together weekly to discuss what is working and is not. Then we set the next months OKRs by running a retrospective of the previous month and looking at how we stay on track for our revenue goals for the year.

What is your North Star metric inside if your company? And why?

The first half of 2023 our North Star was to have a 'Cult Following.' We define this as ā€˜so much customer love that the words customer love don't do it justice.ā€™ Some companies we used as examples of having cult following are Notion, Figma, Superhuman, Linear, Canva, and Slack. We translated what this meant for each of our teams.

ā€˜Give Customers Superpowers!ā€™

For example, the marketing team translated this into ā€˜our community members and prospects feel committed to Pocus and the Product-Led Sales movement.ā€™ Marketing's inspiration was Notion's community and how some community members waited hours in line outside in the rain to get Notion swag.

The reason this is our North Star is that as a category creator, community-led growth and evangelism are key driving forces for us, especially in these first few years. Our goals as a company need to be aligned at this level so that each individual function can prioritize their work and choose goals and KPIs that support the overall objective.

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

Weā€™re currently hybrid as a result of starting the company during COVID, so everyone is everywhere. But there is definitely appetite for in person. To support hybrid we have a few rituals to keep the team connected, such as; quarterly off-sites for the entire team to work together in person, weekly team hangouts in Zoom for more casual time and promoting a culture where folks in cities with more people, like SF and New York, can go and hang out.

Team Pocus, 2023.

Even though Pocus is a remote company, we take every chance we get to meet in person. And every time we do, Iā€™m reminded of how important, and fun, face-time is. Iā€™m so proud of the team weā€™re building and super excited about all the plans weā€™ve laid out for the future.

And that's it! You can follow Alexa on LinkedIn here and check out Pocus if you are looking for a solution for your GTM teams.

HIRING ZONE šŸ‘€ 

Today we are highlighting AI talent available through, Athyna. If you are looking for the best bespoke tech talent, these stars are ready to work with youā€”today! Reach out here if we can make an introduction to these talents and get $1,000 discount on behalf of us.

BRAIN FOOD šŸ§  

We've been playing around with a tool, Spiral, that's designed to handle repetitive writing tasks while keeping your personal style intact. It's pretty greatā€”you set it up with examples of your writing, and it learns to mimic your style for tasks like tweets, blog intros etc.

It's been a game-changer for maintaining quality without the grind, especially when needing to produce content consistently.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK šŸ£ 

COMMUNITY VIBES šŸ” 

TOOLS WE USE šŸ› ļø

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attioā€”powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP šŸ„³

P.S. Want to work together?

  1. Hiring global talent: If you are hiring tech, business or ops talent and want to do it for up to 80% off check out my startup Athyna. šŸŒ

  2. Want to see my tech stack: See our suite of tools & resources for both this newsletter and Athyna you check them out here. šŸ§° 

  3. Reach an audience of tech leaders: Advertise with us if you want to get in front of founders, investor and leaders in tech. šŸ‘€ 

Thatā€™s it from me. See you next week, Doc šŸ«” 

P.P.S. Letā€™s connect on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Reply

or to participate.