“I'm a big believer in luck in the sense that you manufacture it, you put yourself in a position where you can take advantage of it.”
— Adam Lawrence

Today’s guest is Adam Lawrence, a serial founder and currently the COO @Bolt. Adam is a growth-oriented startup leader with unique insights about manufacturing luck, hiring and unlocking talent, and being uncompromising about excellence. This video is perfect for you if:

You are a founder or an aspiring founder, and you want to triage some useful perspectives and experiences against either your own, or other founders.
You are an investor looking to assist your portfolio companies with talent acquisition and team construction.
You appreciate the rewards of hard-work, perseverance, and courageously facing what is in front of you.

Adam is low-key, humble, and a builder by nature. His insights are based on first-hand experiences in the startup world. Enjoy!

Key Themes

Scaling a team when you are no longer in a position to perform 1:1 with everyone.
Using a clearly defined outcome and process to filter bias out of the hiring process.
Running towards the hard things instead of avoiding them.
Modeling excellence by surrounding yourself with excellent people.
Manufacturing ‘luck’ using a growth, ‘can do’ mindset!
Securing global talent during challenging times.
Capturing the upside of the remote-working culture.

Transcript

Adam Lawrence

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you guys. I'm currently the COO at Bolt. What I'm working on right now, a lot of Corona virus-related things, as you can imagine, given the timeframe, but outside of that, I'm working on enterprise sales and growing our company from about 150 people to 200 this year.

Jon Low

Great. Great. And so, Adam, my understanding is obviously not your first company that you've operated at C-level. Can you unpack a bit about your journey into tech and into the space of being a founder and building companies from zero to one?

Adam Lawrence

Yeah, um, I grew up partially in Silicon Valley. So I was exposed to technology from a young age. My dad was a banker for a lot of technology companies. In undergrad I took a pretty traditional finance route for a while so did a banking internship and a trading internship and quickly realized that neither one of those environments was a great fit for me.

Like many then I took a little time off from school and I worked for two startups. absolutely loved the environment. You know, it wasn't that starting with what the companies are doing, but I love the fact that the things that I did contribute to the company right away, you'd work today and see the impact of your work tomorrow. There, you really had the bug in terms of kind of joining and building and venture funded startup. So high growth ended up post undergrad joining as a first employee at a FinTech company.

Jon Low

Great, thank you. And so my understanding is, you know, you have an awareness now that one of the special skills you have is actually synthesizing strategy into a key set of actions that will actually help companies with teams chief that goals. How did you start to figure out that that was an area that one could say is an unfair advantage for you? Because you know, if you grow from 0 to 1, a lot of times you're just a small team of like a handful of people...

Adam Lawrence

Yeah, it's a hard question because I think kind of when you see it to some extent, but I think the things that kind of clicked for me is that coming to the realization that the innovation and building companies is not in building companies, but is solely in the product and the technology that you're delivering. Silicon Valley has this history and story of mentorship and development, you know, whether it's people investing in companies after they've done well, and building the next stage, or you know, it's the 30, 40, 50 years of history of people starting things in their garage, and you can lean on the shoulders of giants for a lot of this stuff. And so if you do that enough, you can create pattern recognition about how to synthesize.

You say, “Okay, great. I've seen something like this before, or if I haven't seen this, I know somebody that has seen it, or I've seen the story or have read this book, or, you know, listen to that podcast that allows you to create a mosaic and a pattern that you can say.”

Okay, great, we're here, we need to go there. How do we bridge that gap? And then if you've hired well, and you've figured out, you know, an appropriate product-market fit, the product stuff should take care of itself, in the sense that you have to work hard in every single thing. But you should do for the rest of the business the things that other people have done really well.

Jon Low

Great, thank you. And in scaling your leadership through people, obviously hiring, you know, setting performance expectations, and leading their personal and professional development is a key aspect. Can you unpack a bit about your personal process or internal model for onboarding and constructing high performing teams, where, you know, one plus one is much greater than three? We might call it talent chemistry...

Adam Lawrence

Yeah. I think the first thing I realized that it's way easier to hire well, then to try to manage, you know, potential underperformers. And so taking your time in the front part of the process in terms of spending time to get to know people doing a lot of conversations and keeping the bar incredibly high is really important.

Oftentimes, I think founders and young teams are willing to sacrifice the talent bar in order to fill in some sort of need, that just pushes problems further down the road. And so first thing is, you know, keep that town bar incredibly high, and don't relent on it. And then when you get people, you need to invest in them. And so that is everything from context.

How do we get here today, you know, where are we going? And then, particularly for roles that you've done as either an individual or as a team, building out the appropriate documentation, so somebody doesn't have to learn from scratch. And so but we have a strong playbook culture, something that we're incredibly proud of and if we're doing things more than twice, we're documenting it and writing it down not only so we can test, iterate and improve but also so we can scale it laterally.

And so it can be a bit overwhelming to come in and see all these playbooks and all this written material, but two or three weeks into the job, provided that they've gone through onboarding with our team and their managers. You know, they have a huge head start.

Jon Low

Thank you. And just kind of you said something interesting about spending a lot of time setting the bar for hiring. And how have you personally and with your team filtered out like personal bias in the process so that you don't lose out on diversity of opinion, thought and talent?

Adam Lawrence

It's really hard because you know, unconscious bias by nature is unconscious, right? It's not looking in the face every single day. So I think it starts with creating a spec of exactly what you want. And that spec needs to clearly articulate the skill sets and the outputs that you want to see from that role. And then you need to apply that through each one of your hiring conversations in a way that you are articulating the interview process to suss those things out.

And so if you're looking for a great salesperson, you know, the mental model for a typical great salesperson is you know, so boisterous and a college athlete that's, you know, willing to stand in a chair and rah rah rah, get the team going. But, you know, if you look at the archetypes of great salespeople, you know, that could be one, but it's not every archetype and it's certainly not, you know, the pattern of what's been successful.

Somebody that, you know, over history of their careers delivered at or above quota again and again and again, and has strong mental models for building teams, strong toolset for, you know, scaling sales organizations for sales ops, or DevOps. And so if you're having those conversations and looking for actual evidence that supports the ability to do those things, you end up removing a lot of the bias from you know, just going for that ‘rah rah’ salesperson for this example.

Jon Low

And just for context, my understanding is also you've had experience scaling teams from like, single digits to well over 100. And obviously that comes with its own set of challenges. But as you look back at your career, multiple startups and including the current one which is Bolt financial, \what are some key challenges that stick out to you or that you use all floor or learned a lot from? If you could unpack some of that, I think that would be really helpful for some viewers.

Adam Lawrence

Yeah, I took the first time I did this, I did. I don't want to say everything wrong, but many things. Um, and so, you know, here's some things that we did wrong and tried to address in future iterations. You know, I think if you have a team of 20, and you're hiring somebody mid career, they're going to ask for a VP title because they can ask for it, right? It's gonna make hiring a lot harder later. It's gonna make your organizational design a lot harder later. People end up craving structure in order to give them goalposts and kind of a mission. And if you don't provide that structure early people end up floundering.

Not everybody knows what it takes to go from one to two to three to four. And so being able to break down, both affect career development aspects, but also the organizational structure aspect of saying, okay, you're part of the machine is in charge of this type of output. Here's how we know this is going well, here's a clear set of expectations.

I think early in my career, we hired a lot of people that looked like us in the sense that they were smart, young and ambitious, but not everybody could conceptualize what it took to build a business. And it took us a long time to figure out where that cognitive gap was that hey, we said, go do sales, and we got no sales from this team. And, you know, it turns out that people didn't know how to do that.

And so the approach that we took a bullet was very different from day one, a strong sense of leveling, strong sense of what each role took a strong sense of performance management, a strong sense of measurement and output, articulation OKRs key results measurement, and then as we've grown from the executive team, you know, driving that into the way in which we run business and so Monday start with the scorecard.

For example, the scorecard goes through each department, what do we measure? What are we looking at? What are we looking for early indicators and lagging indicators? Eventually, that boils down to results in the case of our business, that's sales revenue, you know, as it is, for most, but having a good focus on, you know, what does it take to do things well, and drive that into the roles and positions in the way that you're building the organization?

Jon Low

Thanks. And, you know, a, by the sounds of the language, you didn't figure it out, all this out alone. Does that include peers? Were there some significant mentors who provided a guiding light for you during the early stages of your development?

Adam Lawrence

Yes to all those things, but you know, when I say we, I think of any time that you have like an epiphany or realization, it's usually the combination of a bunch of small things. And then suddenly, there's an aha moment, right. And so I tend to think of these things as, you know, a lot of brainstorming, everybody comes with a slightly different opinion and gets something that's better.

You know, thinking about things like that in terms of the management example, or, you know, fall into that category, that you have a bunch of little conversations in the gate there. But in terms of mentorship, I've been really lucky to work with a bunch of amazing people throughout my career. So, you know, my first full time gig out of school, I was the first employee of the startup and the founder who started a company called Palantir.

Before that, getting that type of experience in terms of seeing what greatness looks like up close early in your career, it changes the trajectory of how hard you're gonna work and what you want to achieve early. It's really hard to do that later in life.

You know, an analogy is exercise, right? If you run every day, now, it's pretty easy. But if you don't run for a year and you try to start it again, it's not and kind of that bar of what high quality work looks like is very similar to exercise, right? There's rigor behind it, there's effort behind it.

Outside of, you know, working for great people, I got exposed to people who have achieved greatness and other companies as well. And so now I'm at a place where I think I can see, you know, when I meet people, I can see things that they're great at, that are individual skill sets that are not just them great as a person, if that makes sense.

And so, you know, no one person I think you should put on a pedestal, but you know, everybody has something that they spike in. And the goal is to figure out how and why they spike in that, and then what things you can take from that and apply it to, you know, your own efforts or, you know, my own efforts there.

Jon Low

Great, thanks. Thanks. So, I say like, were there any other like, moments of fortune that as you reflect on your career as founder and leader that were very helpful for you? Any other serendipitous events, or occurrences that you consider yourself to be quite grateful for?

Adam Lawrence

Yeah, quite a few. Like I'm a big believer in luck in the sense that you manufacture it, you put yourself in a position where you can take advantage of it. So that's saying, yeah, so a lot of things, you know, that's having a positive outlook there that's, you know, being open and having a growth mindset.

Um, if I think of my career in Silicon Valley, like very much starts with luck. I was an undergrad who wasn't going to school came back and was able to get into a program for graduate students to be paired with venture and startup mentors. Believe I was the only undergrad in that program. And you know, applied late wasn't in school before that, but that program ended up you know, connecting with a bunch of people that have pushed my thinking about what I want to do but ended up leading to a fortuitous email introduction to the person that became my first boss, um, you know, complete luck of the gun into the program got mentored by a VC who had blindly invested in a successful entrepreneur. And then, you know, said, “Hey, you should meet this person, I think you guys will get along.”

Um, life's full of those things. And you know, it's because I said yes, because I pushed a little bit because I showed up and because I got into the program. I think a lot of my best hires fall in that camp as well. I think a lot of them came from, you know, referrals of somebody that, you know, maybe I didn't even work with, you know, I interviewed and it didn't work out for some reason, but they had a good experience. And I had a good experience and they referred somebody. So I think about Bolt for example, and I think we've hired three people that were referred by an intern that I had eight years ago. Wow, you know, I fortuitously and lucky that both you know, that intern, who now is a partner at a venture firm? Thought of us had a great network, you know, made good recommendations that fit what we were looking for. And like, yeah, I think that is luck. Like plenty of people make introductions. Not all of them are good, but we say yes to a lot of them.

Jon Low

Oh, wow. Nice. And as you continue to grow your capacity as a COO and as a leader in your career, what do you see some of your growth edges or areas that you're focusing on at this stage in your career?

Adam Lawrence

And there's a few, you know, one. It's really easy to have a lot of false confidence because you have a title you've been promoted to and things like that. But, you know, when you're looking at a challenging time, how do you trust your gut and how do you bring the team along with you and you know, I'd say that's leadership at scale there.

And the difference between doing that at an executive level and doing that, as you know, a strong contributor on a 60 person startup, it's pretty significant. Because you're not just having a bunch of one on one conversations, you're figuring out how to communicate that to the entire team, and figuring out how to get each individual part of those teams to roll in the same direction. And so I look at that as something that I'm always trying to get better at. And I think, you know, the current environment is a great example of that, trying to figure out what we need to do? What are our opportunities? What are the things that we need to mitigate against in case of risk and then how do we communicate to that team.

There's analogy that you know, when you're on a boat, you don't have to worry about the storm waters around you. You have to worry about the storm waters into the boat. I think a lot about that. Like how can we get everybody going exactly the same direction and all unified against whatever it storms around outside.

Jon Low

What are some of the things you've tried out that you've noticed have paid off, maybe in a 10 x way of little things that have made quite a big difference for teams?

Adam Lawrence

Let's start off with a failure mode there. And I think the failure mode, remote work is pretty simple. It's that you try to work remotely the same way that you work in the office. And if you do that, it just doesn't work. Right. If you just move every meeting to Zoom, you're still in meetings all day, you're still you know, chatting. Now it's a little bit buggier. And you can't have, you know, conversations with your neighbors quite as well.

But so we try to look at that and we try to articulate what does it mean to actually be good at remote work? I think what it means is that people get more deep thought time they're interrupted less in order to enable that. Though we have to get better at sharing context around what people are doing, what their peers are doing, and what the business is doing.

And so like this week, for example, a strong focus on taking communication from one to one modalities, like Slack, direct messages and emails, for example, and pushing them into shared channels. So why share channels? It creates a context rich environment for everybody else in that team. So if you're going to ask Bob, hey, Bob, is the system up today? You know, a generic question. But if you ask Bob directly, Bob knows, you know, but if you ask him the channel, and Bob replies, everybody knows. And then, you know, technology is the place where you can show your notifications can control your amount of interruptions. And so you can just turn those off, right. And the same way that you have your phone on, do not disturb.

But having context rich communication that everybody has access to, I think is, you know, the thing that we're focused on, I think the thing that will yield greater results, and if we get in the habit of doing that, we get back to our office in two months. I think we'll be better for it as well.

Jon Low

Well said. I think Arjun and I can both speak to this that we think is quite unique with you, you have this balance between gut instinct, but like pragmatic rationale, your decision making process, as you anticipate the workforce moving back into person and to shelter in place being lifted, right? What do you think are some of the key tectonic plates in team collaboration that might change permanently or for a more extended period of time, after this external shock is well over?

Adam Lawrence

You know, everybody's read some version of a tweet that says, uh, you know, you can do online classes because you had to be in person, right? I had to go to the office because they said it was mandatory that we collaborate there and you know, for the most part, businesses going on going forward. And so I would expect that people look at a lot of those things. And say that, hey, talent is distributed broadly, not just in the Bay Area in New York or large metropolitan areas.

Many companies already have multiple offices anyways, how do we enable our workforce to work remotely? How do we hire remotely? And how do we bring them in? If companies can do that, I think it'll accelerate a lot of hiring in the Bay Area, you know, particularly with housing being made incredibly expensive to hire an incredibly challenging hire there. And if you can hire the same, quality talent already built that muscle to incorporate them into your business, I think you'll be at a tremendous advantage.

Jon Low

And given the economic climate,just a way to close out this interview— what opportunity do you see lies for like, founder, emerging founder talent, and also like, just talent In general, who might be in the market looking for the next opportunity because they got laid off?

Adam Lawrence

I think it's an opportunity to build resiliency. AndI think this is, you know, a time to build your army in terms of people and talent. What I mean by that is if you're willing to flex and do hard things for your people, I think you'll leave this time with an amazing amount of goodwill with your team.

The second part of your question is people being laid off, and I can tell you that every company is laying off people right now. You know, there's things that they can do in their business to hold tight for a little while, if that's what they want to do. Right? You can cut salaries across the board. You can change investments here, you can reallocate talent from one team to another team, where the opportunities lie. Certainly not every business can do that. Right.

If your travel business for example, there's not a lot of travel going on right now. But if you aren't a business where you can make investments in people, I think now is the time to do that. If you are talent looking for an opportunity, I think it can be challenging for a little while, I think it can be challenging for, you know, a few weeks, a month, maybe more as businesses figure out what their needs are.

But if you're willing to take a little bit of risk, I think you can probably find opportunities that are really unique during this time. So whether that's companies that are holding out finding the absolute best person for them, or people building things, you know, in light of challenging economic times, tend to build pretty interesting things. Right. And so, you know, I think about this post 911, a bunch of really interesting things built, particularly, you know, around the combination, both social and deep tech, right, not together, certainly, but like, you know, people did hard things there where they say, well buckle down for a while, we'll figure out how to get it done. And they left the building with amazing innovation.

So I think there's an opportunity to find things like that, that you know, it's not a gig for you. It's like You know, likely you're calling something that'll last for many years and you know, leave that type of experience with just a tremendous wealth of knowledge.