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LATEST POSTS 📚

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🌎 Inboxed: Great Decisions In The Making. The BTS on decisions that shaped the business world.
🌱 Collection: Hybrid, On-Site, Remote & Why? A collection of thoughts from a collection of leaders.
💰 Media + Tech = Negative CAC. How the smartest companies are building a lead gen machine that pays them.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I am writing this while in the air, flying to Cordoba, Argentina for the wedding of Santi, our Head of Product at Athyna. Here below is the screenshot of the moment he messaged me to say he was in.

Life is great like that isn’t it? So many little sliding door moments that could have broken one way, but went the other, for better or worse. In this case for better of course. You spend so much time with the people you work with. It’s really great when you get to share some real life moments with them.

Anyway, that’s it from me today. I hope you enjoy the piece today. I really respect Emmanuel and the way he thinks about business and life. Enjoy!

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Emmanuel Nataf - Co-Founder & CEO at Reedsy

Emmanuel Nataf is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reedsy, a place for authors to learn how to write and create a quality book. Reedsy helps publish 25,000 books pear year and counts over 3,000 top publishing professionals in its community.

Emmanuel is also an active angel investor investing in many early stage startups and is a proud members of Leaders for Climate Action, an entrepreneurial community that drives climate action.

In his spare time, Emmanuel is a photographer in search of all things strange and beautiful at emmanuelnataf.com.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

Working alongside my product team is what excites me the most, but as Reedsy’s CEO, I also spend a significant portion of my time doing recruitment, as well as liaising with the other teams to make sure the different parts of the puzzle are connecting nicely.

Unfortunately over the years, the time I’ve been able to dedicate to the product has shrunk, due to more time being a manager & leader, but it’s one of my objectives to change that and get back hands on with the product.

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

Reedsy is a fully remote company and we try and hire people who are fairly autonomous and independent. We’re trying to build a structure where people come to us, the founders, and make suggestions as to what they should be working on next, as opposed to a traditional top-down approach. We value people who will take initiative and create opportunities for the company.

The goal is something along the lines of what Steve Jobs said: “It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.”

We’re about 45 at the moment and don’t want to grow the team massively—we like it small with everyone able to own large projects.

I see myself as the person who can take a step back and help give orientation. I also try to inject some creativity to make sure we never fall into the ‘business as usual.’

How do you build culture?

When we set out to build Reedsy, we didn't have a clear idea of what our culture should be—our focus was on the product, and the successive hires we made helped us define our culture.

Today, we have a multicultural team of over 45 people, who come from all continents and speak over 15 languages. They're concise communicators and autonomous individuals. They care about being excellent at what they do. Lastly, they have a sense of meaning—Reedsy's goal is to support a whole generation of creators.

We operate the company independently and try to remain humane—we believe you can grow fast and make an impact without raising millions from investors.

We’re entrepreneurs, designers, writers, hackers, cyclists, engineers, runners, developers, football analysts, musicians, photographers, readers, travelers, gardeners, knitters, hikers, campers, and hard workers.

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

First, I’d like to say that there isn’t an infinite pool of all-star talent, and I’d like to avoid creating the illusion that you can grow fast and only hire top talent. That’s why we grow our team slowly. We get 150 applications per week and don’t hire more than 15 people per year. And among those 15, we can be wrong 20% of the time.

All applicants have to complete a written assignment, which takes between 1 hour for an intern, to 5 hours for a software engineer. We believe that people who truly want to join us should be willing to make a time investment.

We’ve found that 90% of the time, we know whether we’d like to hire the person after reading their assignment.

💡 Note: I asked for an example of one of these assignments from Emmanuel.

This example is an application from an illustrator, Dylan Thurgood, whose assignment was: Could you design an exit modal image for people to sign up to our "How to self-publish a book" Reedsy Learning course?

While we didn’t hire that candidate, as we couldn’t agree to terms, we liked that he explained the reasoning behind every decision. His work was on brand and professional. He was far more than just an Illustrator.

How do you set goals?

Having run Reedsy for 9 years, we now understand how cyclical our business is, and when and how we can expect to grow. It’s allowed us to remove a lot of the uncertainty that comes with setting general goals. For instance, using historical growth, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what our top line revenue should be for the year ahead, allowing us to set achievable goals.

However, we know that all those plans can get affected by macroeconomic events that are out of control, COVID for example, and we avoid setting goals for the sake of it.

Also, as we’re looking to grow fairly organically, we operate in a more flexible way to most—things are ready when they are, not because of an imaginary deadline. We do not use OKRs and other methods of goal setting and will never implement those framework.

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

We’ve been fully remote since the beginning and love it. It increases our chances of finding ‘All-Star talent,’ creates a more diverse team by nature, allows everyone to organize themselves more freely, pollutes less, etc..

💡 Extra reading: Check out this piece: Reedsy designer lives, works and travels from his van.

You raised one round of venture capital and then went back to bootstrapping, why?

As founders, we never really understood why VCs would take such a preponderant role as soon as you’d raise a Series A. In particular, we never understood the point of a board, or why someone with a minority shareholding would be able dictate what you could or couldn’t do.

Luckily, as we were about to raise an A round with term sheets on the table, we realized Reedsy could quickly become profitable and we could continue without additional funding. It was a path to freedom!

A few years later, we did a secondary round, allowing our early investors to exit if they wanted to. Most of them stayed with us, despite our untraditional views on how to grow a company.

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

I’m addicted to the effort, not the reward. I will keep going until I get where I want to be, no matter what. I realize that it might feel a bit weird or intense to most, but for me, it’s the only way. This is true for Reedsy (though after 9 years, it’s a different type of effort), my long-distance cycling adventures, and my photography.

I think this mindset comes from my upbringing, having spent most of my childhood with Jewish grandparents, and in particular with my grandfather who was in the Resistance during WWII. My co-founder Ricardo likes to make jokes about how I inherited the Ashkenazi mindset from my mum’s side and rejected the fun Sephardic attitude from my dad’s.

Putting aside the environment I grew up in, living a healthy lifestyle helps—I don’t drink alcohol, never go to bed overly late, you’ll never see me in a nightclub, cook my own meals, exercise, etc..

And lastly, I try to find inspiration in different ways, regularly seeing exhibitions, going to concerts, and traveling.

And that's it! Connect with Emmanuel on LinkedIn, follow his Twitter here and don’t forget to check out Reedsy if you are looking at writing your memoir.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

I’ve gone through more strategy frameworks than I can count, but this one from Productify might just be the only strategy framework you’ll ever need.

If you’re looking to get a real grasp on where you’re headed, why it matters, and how to get there, this article is a must-read.

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—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 🥳

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.
🏡 Looking for a personal board of directors: Check out Sidebar.
👀 Reach thousands of tech leaders: Advertise with us here.

And that’s it! See you next time. ✌️