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💨 Blue Ribbon, MJ & The Swoosh: The Story Of Phil Knight. How Nike was founded, the battle it fought and how it got to where it is today.
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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

This week was one of the most difficult weeks I have had in a very long time. Things at Athyna were about as enjoyable as chewing glass, I struggled big time with anxiety attacks at a mates wedding and we had a departure that upset me a lot to top it off.

And here is an open invitation to you. If you had a shit week and want to vent, reply to this message. We can vent together. If you are reading this, I am here to support you. And you, without knowing it, by being the eyeballs on the other end of these words support me more than you now. Anywho, onto today’s edition.

LEADER OF THE WEEK 🎙

Ross Chaldecott - Co-Founder & CEO at Kinde

Ross is Co-founder and CEO of Kinde, a Sydney based startup reinventing the way software companies get started, in order to create a world with more founders.

He has more than 20 years of experience working in executive design leadership roles in global tech leaders and startups, most recently as Director of UX at Shopify. Previously he was the Head of Design at Campaign Monitor, and Senior Manager of UX at Atlassian.

Ross and Kinde have some of the best backers in the world including backing and advisors from Blackbird, Felicis, Atlassian, Culture Amp & Dovetail. They also boast some of the biggest companies in the world as their clientele.

What is your main day to day job as CEO?

Being a relatively small company, everyone at Kinde wears a lot of hats. I’m no different. That’s part of the fun of the job. My primary role is as CEO and the job involves three key things: culture and storytelling, team building and hiring, and vision and strategy.

And, of course, making sure we have the money to deliver on those—but I really see that as a function of the others. Having the right team, the right minds, and the right skills in place ultimately leads to the necessary revenue growth and financial control to keep things running smoothly.

Any one of those things slips and we’re not going to be an effective company. What it really comes down to is spending a lot of time with the team and removing blockers to enable them to be most effective. I make sure I create space for the team to take ownership and make sure they have all the information they need to make smart decisions autonomously.

As a product company, a typical day will almost always involve some kind of design, strategy or review session with one of our teams.

We’re a heavily design driven company so we’re pretty ruthless about peeling back the layers of everything we put out there to make sure we get to something that’s elegant, beautiful and effective. This takes a lot more work than I think people realise, but hopefully if you’ve tried our product or seen any of our marketing you’ll feel the love that’s gone into it.

We try to be pretty conscious of how much we try to do at any one time. We’ve found as a company that there is a finite amount of projects we should be working on at any one time if we want to deliver really great results. So we keep it limited. I think like most great companies there is always more we want to do than we can possibly accomplish, so we try to be pretty strict about prioritizing and only doing as much as we can all realistically hold in our heads as a team.

This means saying no to a lot of things, but it also means doing really well at a handful of small things—but making sure they are really amazing.

💡 Bonus: If you are a scaling startup learning about security check our the SasS Security Bootcamp by Kinde.

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

At a very high level I think great leadership is just generally giving a shit about people, and then giving them the alignment and autonomy to go and achieve something great. But there’s really a lot of detail behind that so it’s probably worth digging in.

When you look at what a company is, it’s fundamentally just a group of people with a shared mission and values, who are trying to accomplish something together. That’s it. So when you approach it that way, it’s really important that we build a team that is hugely driven by our mission and our vision. At Kinde we spend a whole lot of time making sure our team understand why we do the things that we do. How creating a world with more founders is one of the most profoundly impactful thing that they could invest their time in. Because starting any kind of startup is not an easy thing so you really want people who are in it for the journey.

We have our Strategy on a Page to make sure we’re aligning everything we’re doing to the 3 focus areas we believe are most relevant to achieving that success. That way every person in the company can see a direct line of sight between the work that they do and the outcomes we are striving for.

Side note here is that it’s also really important that our mission is worthy of being the most important work of someone’s life, but that’s a different topic.

There’s more to how we align and break down the actual work which we can talk about later. For now what’s important is that once people understand what we are trying to achieve, they are aligned, then it’s up to them to figure out how to go about achieving that outcome. And we try to create as much space and freedom for our people to figure out the most effective way to do something. The person who is doing the work is typically the person who is best positioned to know how to do it - because they’re looking at it every day. So we give them as much autonomy, and support, as possible.

This only works if you’re actively encouraging risk taking and failure. If the team is afraid of failure then you stifle risk taking. Which means people stop trying new things—and you kill innovation. We want our team to have every opportunity to innovate. I try to encourage failure and learning within our leadership team as much as possible also.

The last piece of this is in making people feel safe. In genuinely caring about them. And this only comes from getting to know the team. Getting to know what’s going on in their lives. Asking questions about how things are going for them. Treating them like human beings. And making them feel like the hero of the Kinde story and their own story. Even more important in the hard times when they’re struggling, than in the good times when things are easy.

At the end of the day, the vast majority of the success of Kinde is down to our team. I’m just here to cheerlead from the sidelines. People and team are literally everything. Without them we achieve nothing.

_{*Note: I just love this answer. What a leader.}

How do you build culture?

There’s a whole book that could be written here. I believe that Kinde’s culture is something quite unique and incredibly special, so possibly in time there will be a book on it. For now, I’ll just touch the surface.

For us, culture has always been something we set out to craft intentionally. Instead of making it an accidental thing that just happened.

This started with our values. A lot of founders get started by hiring a bunch of people who look and sound like themselves. People they would want to have a beer with. Over time the company grows up and somebody realizes they need values. So they take a look at what characteristics make a successful employee at the company and then try to codify and distill that essence down into a set of values.

This works fine—and is a very standard approach to doing it. The trouble is that it leaves your values, and your culture, largely up to chance until you do that work later.

At Kinde we did something different. We sat down and tried to understand what would be a great culture. One that we would love to work in. A place that would be incredible. And then we used that to define our values. These are aspirational values rather than responsive values. To be valuable every value has to be something that, while desirable at Kinde, might be undesirable elsewhere in a different company and culture. That’s how you know they’re not just platitudes.

To give you an example, our value of ‘Human kindness, gentle manners’ is probably the one I hear mentioned most often by the team when describing each other. And you can definitely see it in the people we attract and the people we hire. There is just a gentleness in our team that I love, and I don’t think you see it that often. Calm determination at work, to me, is far more powerful than the opposite value—that would be highly prized in other companies—of being bold and strong and domineering.

We use our values constantly. They’re not just things we look at from time to time. They’re a core part of our culture. We talk about them frequently and also use then for all of our hiring. Every person who works at Kinde does a values interview. To make sure they feel like they’ll be a good fit for the culture we’ve created.

So it all starts with values. From there it’s about making sure we create a place where people love to work, and are challenged by the problems that they get to solve. Bored people aren’t going to be highly motivated people. We want them to be challenged, and to challenge and inspire each other to be as incredible as possible. Another of our values there: ‘A company of giants.’

Storytelling is another major part of making sure we’re all aligned on the culture we’re trying to create. In every person’s first week I sit down with them for two hours and walk them through every part of Kinde. How it works, how it makes money and how we win. We also speak at length about our values and why they matter. The aim is to make sure that they understand what we are like and how we behave. We don’t leave anything up to chance.

Lastly, I think a lot of it comes down to how the leadership behaves. If our leaders behave badly, then this will set the precedent. If our leaders truly live our values, then our team will be just fine.

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

As with all things Kinde, we try to treat recruitment in the most human way possible. At every step we look at how we can optimize the process as far as possible. We aren’t doing a lot of hiring right now – our team right now is largely the size it needs to be—but when we do we’ve found that we don’t struggle a lot to attract talent. I think this probably comes down to the awesome employer brand that the team has built. People tend to self select in rather than us having to do a whole lot of sourcing.

When we have needed to source, we’ve tended to avoid external recruiters, and found that we get far better value and higher quality candidates by having our team refer people from their own networks. This has multiple benefits. We know the people are going to be good—because our team is vouching for them. We also know that they already know Kinde and have a good frame of reference for what we’re like. So it’s really a two sided benefit. Generally we’ve found this tends to result in mostly incredible people joining.

Once they’re in the pipeline we really focus on understanding the whole person. Values interviews and an interview with myself make it so that the focus isn’t purely on the work. Obviously we care very deeply about the work and go deep into that part with the person. But it’s the other parts that help us to build a richer and more detailed view of the person and whether we think they will love working here.

One of the things I find really helps us understand whether somebody has the appetite for startup life, is I spend a lot of time telling potential hires how crazy it is to join a startup and that they really shouldn’t do it. The ones who’s eyes light up and who get excited by the challenge—they’re the ones for us.

How do you set goals?

At a team level we’re not particularly goal driven right now. We don’t have OKRs or any other formal goal tracking mechanisms in place. Since we’re a small time we all know what we’re trying to achieve and when it needs to happen by. The team themselves own figuring out how to execute on that. Goals feel like a waste of planning time in that world.

We plan releases in high detail. We use an approach called Swarming where every 6 weeks we plan the overall work that needs to happen and then the individual team members themselves pick up the work they feel they can bring the most value to within that. Goals on top of this just feel like adding additional oversight on the team that we don’t particularly need. If we ship the release or drive the visitor number where we want it to be, then this means success.

_{*Adding this awesome piece for context on Kinde.}

As a company we’re all aligned around a high level set of focus areas and measures. We have a one page document—our strategy on a page—which is our top level strategy across everything that we do. If you’re working on something that isn’t on there it means that you may well be working on the wrong thing. Everything in our swarm plan should line up to one, or more, of our focus areas.

Keeping the number of areas we focus on to a limited number that can fit on a single page really makes sure we’re not doing more than we should.

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

We have the incredible advantage as a company of being born during pandemic years. And so we’ve always just naturally been remote. Our team is used to thinking and operating this way. And so, in general, we operate as a remote company. In reality it’s a little more complicated than that, in that we actually really want to encourage people to work where most makes sense to them.

For most of our team this is remote. For some people this is in the office. And so we give every person the choice about where they would prefer to be that day. More specifically; you can work from home, or from a WeWork anywhere in the world. Anywhere with an internet connection really. You get to decide every day. It’s really that simple. And we find that this works for us.

I am still a big believer in face-to-face time and so, from time to time we do try to bring larger groups or the whole team together to spend time together. We had a retreat towards the end of last year to bring all of our people together. The intent of this was less to work together, more to spend time together and get to know each other. The team loved it and I genuinely think it made us better and stranger as a team.

In this regard I think that offices are actually quite interesting. They’re a terrible place for people to do focus work, but a really great place for working together on problems. And so we do really think about offices in future. But we think of them more as being a place for collaborative work. Get rid of the fixed desks and replace them with whiteboards and couches and comfortable places for time together and encouraged creativity and play.

I also feel there’s an interesting opportunity to welcome our customers into our workspace in future. Make it a place where they can come to be supported and spend time with the team, and give the team opportunity to learn from them directly. Feels like a win both ways.

And that's it! Head to Kinde’s website to try it out for free, or join their Slack Community here.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

I just checked out a sweet piece on validating startup ideas: Idea validation framework by Consumer Startups, perfect for anyone in the B2C space. 100 interviews with founders and boils down to four key strategies that could help anyone trying to figure out if their new idea could actually work.

If you’re toying with a startup idea and wondering how to test its potential, this article is a great starting point.

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. ✌️