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🫠 Neumannomics: A Deep Dive. Co-Founder & Ex-CEO at WeWork. How to build a cult, burn it the ground and buy it back again.
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LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

This week I am answering the questions that we send out to all of our interview guests so that you can get to know me, the author of this newsletter, a little better. All that I ask is that you don’t laugh or cry when I refer to myself in the third person. Anyway, here we go.

An interview with myself, Bill Kerr

Bill Kerr (born Jan 12, 1986), nicknamed Doc, is Founder & CEO of Athyna, a global talent platform that matches incredible talent, with AI-precision—at lightning speed.

He is also a Mentor & Investor at Startmate, where in the last cohort he was the #1 ranked mentor of 150 mentors and is an active angel investor, along with being the author of this very newsletter.

Tell us about the problem you are trying to solve? Why this?

My first startup was really hard. The product was incredible, the experience was second-to-none but we were never really making any money. So, in order to get the company off the ground I started by building a global team. I’d travelled to 50+ countries in the past and knew that people were just as smart all around the world, so why not hire them?

The great thing about global teams is though that not only do you give a startup founder, or scaling team access to insanely good talent, you usually provide a great job for the person on the other side. We average between 40-50% salary bumps when people make the move to Athyna and in junior cases it’s a lot more.

💡 Note: If you are hiring globally—devs role or GTM roles—my startup Athyna can help.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

It's hard really. Some days I don't really know what my job is. There are periods in which I feel lost and redundant and then there are other stretches when I have the work on three people of my plate. I've not worked in any other startup—or company in general—outside of my own so I've had to craft my own philosophy.

I have a screen saver on my desktop that reminds me of my role, which I think it strategy, financing, recruitment, communications and holding people accountable.

Operationally, I try to make sure we are heading in the right direction ay all times. I meet with my direct reports bi-weekly to be able to troubleshoot and help them unlock wherever they are stuck. Once a month we do a 50 minute call and then two weeks later we do a shorter call we call our ‘Walk & Talk’, where we chat with less of an agenda. The Walk & Talks are great because we give ourselves the option to be outside walking the dog or a quick phone call while one of us is out and about.

To be honest though, I think my number one job and the thing that I am conscious of every day is to lead. Which means going out and setting a great example to our team. Whatever that looks like every day, every week, every month.

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

We have a motto at Athyna and that is ‘What would Ned Stark do?’, which in short really just means do the right thing. That's the most important thing for me. How I act and how I behave is how those around me will behave. So I try my best to be fair, honest, and act with integrity at all times. I do this to a fault at times but I think doing anything but this means you are using short term thinking and it will come back to bite you in the future.

I also think becoming a good leader is a process. I read a lot, speak with advisors & mentors—watch more Game of Thrones. The greatest leadership story in history in my opinion actually comes from Game of Thrones.

What does your team look like? Who are your direct reports?

I am the first person to put my hand up and say it but I manage way too many people right now. I currently manage 10 reports. I have an Exec Coach, Bryce, and we are trying to strategise how I get this down between 4-6. A large group like the one that I manage today means I am watered down.

The other thing is, I have never felt like I am a great manager. I think I am a great leader and CEO but as a manager, day-to-day, I think I have a lot of room to improve. So, I probably should have way less reports so I can dedicate the time I need to each of them.

What is your North Star Metric inside of your company and how are you trying to improve it?

Our North Star is NRR—or Net Revenue Retention. I think if you are in the subscription revenue business and this is not your North Star you are not thinking clearly. In order to improve our NRR, we are trying to move upstream. We have just started landing some really large enterprise accounts which is amazing. Enterprise accounts have a much more stable business, are always going to open more roles and are generally just a smoother more mature organisation.

Aside from moving upstream, I guess the other thing we are really always testing is which talent vertical, industry, funding stage etc. suits us best. We are in the positon now where we can really start to pull apart parts of the data to make informed decisions here—which is awesome. To churn is to die and all.

How do you build culture?

Brand is step one in order to build a great culture. You need to know inside and out what you want to stand for. How you want people to behave. Values, mission, vision, motto, impact etc.. Then the aesthetic part of your brand follows from there.

If you are able to build an incredible brand and speak with a clear, congruent voice you will eventually build an environment in which great people come knocking on your door to work with you. And then it's about how you treat them. Our previous Head of People & Culture at Athyna once told me "culture isn't people talking at the water-cooler ... culture is how you treat people" and I never forgot that.

I’ve never really understood the whole idea that building a culture remotely is hard, as I don't think culture and proximity are really related. But you do have to be particular and do the work when you are remote. One small cultural add we have is to share the details of new hires before they start in your comms channels.

We do this because making a move is hard. You are leaving a place you are comfortable for the unknown. We try to minimise that fear by having the entire team reach out and say hello. The results are amazing.

The new joiner is usually flooded with good vibes from the team, meaning they have no ‘signers remorse’ and generally are just chomping at the bit to get started.

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

Firstly, my job is to be a human megaphone, echoing our vision in as many places as possible. I feel like I am doing well there so far but you I could never do too much in this department.

I think one of the most important skills you can have as a leader, founder, CEO etc., is to be an excellent storyteller. You need to inspire through words. And second is brand. In order to recruit the best talent you need to have an incredibly strong employer brand. We communicate things really well at Athyna, have a community that loves us and internally, we treat people well. We have a crazy strong culture—92% engagement on average. This means we get flooded with inbound and referrals, and when we do need to go headhunting we have the right doors open to us.

One really cool thing we do at Athyna is ask all of our team who their top three all time favourite colleagues are and we store them all in an internal database. This works incredibly well because when we are looking for a BDM for example we can often find someone in our internal database.

Overall, get really good at employer branding and storytelling as a leader and you will do better than most.

How do you set goals?

We use OKRs on a six-month cycle, and we attack the problem from both a top-down and bottoms-up approach. Top down wise, we meet as a leadership group and spend a session white-boarding on FigJam for our biggest problems and areas we want to put work into. We write the elements we want to work on, group them and then vote on them. After we do this I go back and create, with feedback from other leaders, our organisational goals. Then from the bottom up our leaders go back to their teams and do the same.

Each team will end up with internal objectives and key results that are tied to our organisational goals. We try to keep the org goals to around four each cycle. This has worked so far for us but we are testing and iterating on this and trying to find our sweet spot as goal setting is actually a pretty recent phenomenon at Athyna.

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

We are a fully remote team, spread across a number of different countries so really we are remote-first. However we do have co-working passes, meaning, we are a little hybrid as well. The plan for us as we continue to scale is to build out more 'hubs' around the world. We are very top heavy Argentina and Brazil at the moment, which is great as we have some chances to have the team get together but it also means there is a risk for others at Athyna to fell 'less than'. And that doesn't sit well with me.

It's my firmly held opinion that the best teams are built remotely. Better access to talent, happier & more productive employees and costs savings on desks and office space.

How do you get the best out of yourself personally and professionally?

I am not the best at looking after myself. I eat really well, I train loads, I track my sleep, but I also grind myself into the ground with work and sometimes my quality of life suffers. I can be head down for so long that when I look up, weeks have passed without much social interaction aside from with my partner and my dog.

Something I learnt recently from Sidebar—my accountability group I am in—is the habit of booking all of your leave at the start of the year. I haven’t got trips planned by the last week or two of every quarter I have booked my leave. And now, it’s all about just filling those dates with events. Starting with hiking the W Trek in Chilean Patagonia in the next week or two. If I can keep my mind from getting too bogged down with work I think I can stay in a pretty positive place.

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

I love Hubspot. So today’s Tweet Of The Week and Brain Food are linked. Both dedicated to Hubspot and their phenomenal growth. One worth studying.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠

Here is some of said study—again courtesy of Jason Lemkin of SaaStr.

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we use inside of our businesses. Today we are highlighting Deel — the only HR platform with everything you need, for everyone. EOR, contractor management, immigration and more.

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

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

Here are the options I have for us to work together. If any of them are interesting to you - hit me up!

🌏 Hiring global talent: Check out my startup Athyna.
🧰 Want to outperform the competition: See our suite of tools & resources.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️