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LATEST POSTS 📚

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

❤️‍🩹 Dust Yourself Off & Try Again: 8 Famous Founder Failures. If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
🌱 Collection: How To Set Company Goals. A collection of thoughts from a collection of leaders.
 📣 A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice. A step-by-step guide on creating a tone & identity your audience will love.

PARTNERS 💫

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I became an Evangelist for Sidebar this week—what does that mean? Well, not sure yet. Best way I can describe it is if an ambassador drank too much Kool-Aid. I was one of Sidebar’s first members and it has been the platform I have used to try to up-level my career.

It’s basically small group executive coaching and accountability. I think all leaders need this. Or at least this leader does. Sidebar became a sponsor shortly after I began as a member and now I am helping them grow.

So, if you have any questions about Sidebar, feel free to reach out if you want to chat. Oh and hey, today’s interview is with Lexy himself. Enjoy!

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Lexy Franklin - CEO at Sidebar

Lexy Franklin is the founder and CEO of Sidebar, a leadership program with expertly matched peer groups, goal tracking, messaging, and facilitated sessions customized to each person. Lexy brings over a decade of product innovation experience with leadership roles at Meta, Striiv, and Booyah, Inc. He holds a bachelor’s degree from Stanford University.

Sidebar just raised over $13M in funding from Foundation Capital, Scribble Ventures, Pinterest co-founder Evan Sharp, Moment co-founder Tim Kendall, Front CEO Mathilde Collin and more. Pretty decent social proof right there. Let’s dive inside of the mind of Lexy.

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

I started Sidebar because leadership can be lonely, especially in a virtual world. Peer-based coaching is an untapped competitive advantage.

I loved working at Facebook. I was surrounded by some of the smartest people in the world and my goal was to learn as much as possible from them. There was plenty of room to collaborate, but there was not an easy forum to consistently learn best practices from my peers. It makes sense. Everyone is so busy. I thought; ‘If this does not fully exist at Facebook, a company known for being the best at execution, it is probably a problem everywhere.’ And this was before COVID. When everyone started working remotely, everything became harder by orders of magnitude. I knew there had to be a huge opportunity to connect professional peers.

Remote working has only deepened the divide between meaningful connections.

I believe that nothing will get you further in your career than learning from your peers. Peers encourage. Peers challenge. Peers hold us accountable. Peers accelerate us. I wanted to make this type of unlock more accessible to more leaders.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

At Sidebar, our entire team wants to accelerate our member’s careers. That is winning for us. That is the lens through which I look through everything at Sidebar. In every meeting, we are thinking about - what are the ways we can help people be more impactful at work.

My role in each meeting is to unblock each member of the team so they can fly. If I am doing my job well, our team consistently moves faster and faster and our members feel that speed in the product experience.

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

I try to bring empathy, collaboration, and focus to the team. My team makes me better, and I learn from them every day. This type of collaboration is within Sidebar the company but also the product we’re building—a service for leaders. The magic starts when the right people come together. I just want to learn. That is what it comes down to the most. I am honored to be in the room with people as brilliant as our team. I want to do my part, move as fast as possible, and keep up.

I have found that 90% of the time, I generally know what to do at work and in my job. If I am in a role where I am going fast, 10% of the time, I am doing something that is new and I am not 100% sure of exactly what to do next. These challenges are harder. I have questions and I am strategizing through my answers.

When you consider that means 90% of the time, I feel good about where I'm at, that's okay.

But the 10% can feel much bigger than it actually is—especially if I want to make a positive difference in a billion people’s lives in my lifetime, which is my personal goal.

That 10% has taught me something important; everyone needs people in their life to authentically talk through the 10% and unblock. To blast through it.

💡 Note: Learn more about Lexy’s thoughts on this here on LinkedIn.

How do you build culture?

Before starting the company, I was taught culture is built in all the collective little decisions a team makes every day. It is true. Our culture at Sidebar is really the sum part of all of the individual decisions we make; what we chose to prioritize, how we run meetings, the speed at which we accomplish tasks, how we learn from each other.

We build culture in three distinct ways. Firstly, we constantly communicate. The more our team is talking to each other the better. We spend a lot of time talking to each other. Secondly, we hold ourselves accountable. We are not a culture of blame and we do take accountability. And thirdly, we solve problems with diverse perspective.

The Sidebar team is also inspired by our community and the lives of our members. We’re constantly sharing their stories and celebrating their successes, which inspires us to continue to innovate on their behalf.

Sidebar members come from all walks of life, and all sorts of backgrounds—they are startup founders, senior leaders, CEOs, Oscar winners, and Olympians. But all share important attributes: an incredible growth mindset, a demonstrated track record of success, and an ability to embrace the constant change that comes with rapid progress success.

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

In a similar way to how we vet members for the Sidebar community, I look for growth-minded leaders who can adapt easily to change and the pace that comes with career progression.

Today, we employ people across product, engineering, facilitation, research, operations, and sales, and we are growing across the company. Fundamentally, we are a technology company, and we’re hiring engineers to help us build the next version of Sidebar, including even better algorithms to match people and new and innovative ways to collaborate through our virtual platform and other member tools.

Take facilitators for example. Facilitators must pass an two initial screening interviews and then a group interview with our facilitator team where they facilitate a Sidebar session with our current facilitators as members. Finally, they will meet with me. A big insight is that you may really like a candidate and we need to make sure they can facilitate.

Our program also features professional facilitators, so we’re looking for more people to help our members reach their career goals. And, of course, we’re adding to many of the other functions a growing company needs to operate.

I think the biggest lesson I have learned here is that ‘the first twenty people bring in the next two hundred.’ It is really hard to keep the bar. I have personally seen people do it though, so just because it is hard does not mean it is not an excuse to go climb the mountain and stay patient to figure it out. We have talked to 70+ people for some roles—that may not be ideal—and our bar is really high.

How do you set goals?

On the Facebook growth team, I learned the power of excellent execution. Each week we would have a standup meeting where the core team would outline asks and deliverables. There was no way you were showing up to that meeting without results. The social accountability was so powerful. I brought that same feeling to Sidebar. You set goals and have people counting on you to see it to completion.

Let’s take an example. We are working on top of funnel growth metrics. Overall, we broke down the three major components that go into top of funnel growth: marketing efficiency, conversion, and member nominations. Within marketing efficiency, there is both a efficiency increase we want to see and correlation to paid spend we want to reach. We decided to set the goal around paid spend conversion because that was the best proxy we could measure for the overall goal we want to achieve—top of funnel growth. This goal is assigned to one driver on the team however we talk about it in every team meeting.

Any person on the team in any meeting should be able to tell you what the marketing efficiency goal is if asked. That’s the barometer we use to tell if the team is using the goals to drive impact.

What is your north star metric inside if your company? And why?

Ultimately, we want to help members reach their ambitious goals with the help of peer-based groups, facilitators, and social accountability. Every day we see members supporting each other to achieve their career goals and solve challenges. As one example, one member founded his own company with encouragement from his group, another took on the role of CEO, and another pivoted his career from tech to author.

The impact of Sidebar isn’t just on an individual. Better leaders positively impact their team, family, and friends. There is a multiplicative effect.

We are a very data-informed company. There are metrics we look at across retention, engagement, and growth. From a north star though—it is happy customers, where customers are defined as members who say Sidebar made a significant improvement in their career trajectory.

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

I’m based out of San Diego, but the company is remote. We’re building a service that solves the problem of lack of communication and connection in a virtual world, and so it only makes sense that we virtually conduct our business as well, which is also how so many of our members are working on a day-to-day basis.

In a remote environment, we’ve found that being intentional about bringing the team together for unstructured working time is as important as regular meetings. We hold what we call virtual Teamwork Dreamwork sessions that are intended to mimic an open office working space with the spontaneity of you never know who’ll you’ll run into. The full team is invited and people drop in and out of it as it works with schedules. We also do meet up in-person often, which are always some of my favorite times with the team.

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

There are five crucial pillars that I need to fly. I need to sleep, I need to eat, I need exercise, I need to take my vitamins, and I meditate. If I do those five, I feel like I am flying. If not, I am not as energized.

Professionally, I am an extremely driven person. I always have been. I actually really like the intense version of myself. I want to drive an impact in the world. I actually think the way that I get the best out of myself professionally is I am kind to myself in my head. It is counter-intuitive, and over time I have really learned to be nice to myself in my internal conversations. It does not mean, I am not ambitious, I really am, and I like to be encouraging when I am sitting in my own thoughts.

You can follow Lexy Franklin and check out Sidebar if you are looking to build and grow your network of peers.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

Airbnb goes full Will Wonka on us.

We feel you Dylan-san.

Feeling for you Logan.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

Turpentine—the B2B podcasting network—released their master plan document recently and it was a fascinating read. They talk about how media assets and creators are the future of go-to-market.

At Athyna, we are placing a massive bet on creators and will be announcing a funding round led mostly by creators shorty, so this stuff is incredibly interesting to me and I think it will be to you too.

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 PostHog - product analytics, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, data warehouse 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. ✌️