>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's at the top of the Westfield Mall. Come on by sometime if you're doin' some shoppin', but we're here at Girls in Tech Catalyst. Really cool convention. We were in Phoenix a couple years ago, about 700 women, girls, some students that came in, and a few men as well. Really talking about great inspirational stories. Unbelievable lineup of leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they were, and sharing the information. Now we're excited to have our first guest. She's Patty McCord. She's an author of this great book, Powerful, and she used to be the head of HR, or chief, >> Talent officer. >> Talent officer at Netflix. Patty, great to see you. >> Nice to meet you, too. >> Absolutely. >> Yay. >> So you're going to be speaking in a little bit, so what is your topic on today? >> The future of work, but mostly I'm going to talk about my experience with work over the last 30 years, and that the future of work is right now. We just don't operate that way. >> So, Patty, what do people get right about culture, what do they get wrong about culture? >> What they get wrong about it is they think it's a document. They think if you write it down, you're done, and what they get wrong about it is they don't walk the walk, right? I mean, I know that's simple and cliched, but I can't tell you how many startup CEOs I meet that say, I want to be this, and I want to this. I want to be efficient, right? I want to be straightforward. Well, is there information that you hide from employees, and do you show up to meetings on time? Uuh, right? And it's also about the stories that you tell, what becomes legend, and people love those positive legend stories, and they forget that when you screw up, we'll tell that story for 10 years, right? And the third thing, I think, is people get nostalgic, and they think they can keep it, especially in little companies. Let's keep the culture the way it is, and you cannot do that if you are successful. >> It's so bizarre that people don't get the kind of do what I say, versus do what I do. I mean, this is 101, and it's such a slap in the face when a leader says one thing, and then immediately does something different. >> And you wonder, how did they end up to be this way, when their saying is break things, right? >> Well, failing up is a whole different conversation that we'll save for another day. >> But let's take failing up, right? I talked to a CEO who told me I give everybody who makes a mistake a bottle of champagne to celebrate failure. I'm like, well that's stupid. (both laugh) But it only matters if you fail up if you learn something from it, and that's the demonstrable stories that you tell, that become part of your culture, rather than you get rewarded with champagne if you screw up. >> And then the other thing we were talking about before we turned the camera on are some of these just kind of arcane, old processes that people just put 'em in it, is it-- >> Well, let's start with the fundamentals. I'm going to hire you, and you'll have a career for the rest of your life in our company. Big fat lie, has been for decades, and we still tell it, right? Second one-- >> God, people still tell that story? >> They still do tell that story. >> I've been in Silicon Valley too long. >> Yeah, me too, but I mean, I travel all over the world now, and I hear that story all the time. The second one, which I'll talk about in a minute, is we're family. You're not, right? It's not family, it's work. It's two different things. >> You pay me to come every day. >> That's right, so it's not just the processes that are archaic, like you and I talked about the annual performance review, which is we don't step back like we do with every part of the business and say, why did we do that? What's its purpose? Is it still effective, right? If it is a process to give people feedback so they'll improve their performance, you do it once a year? >> Right, like that's really going to make a big impact. >> Yeah, that's kind of dumb, and then I'm going to figure out how to pay you based on what you did or didn't do last year? And particularly for women, I mean particularly for women, the compensation systems that we have, equal pay, those are issues that they're just writing checks. How hard can this be to figure this stuff out, and when you do it, it's actually not that much money. So I'm advocating, I'm kind of on my bully pulpit here, saying people in my organizations, in HR, we need to fix the stuff that's broken, own the fact that we broke it, and stop talking about it in a language nobody understands. >> Is there some just historical legal compliance issues and stuff that keeps things like the annual performance review going, or is just minutiae? >> There's sort of this inward naval gazing thing we do, where go, well, it's best practices, 'cause everybody does it. I mean, I talk to people who say, well it's a legal requirement. No, it's not, right? We don't even ask. (laughs) If there's a law, I coach people-- >> You haven't seen it yet, and you've had the C title forever. >> I coach people all the time. When your lawyer says you can't do it, you say why, and they say, well it's against the law, and you say can I see the statute? They're written in english, right? It's not Sanskrit, right? So look at it and say, well that's not what I read it to say. Well, if you didn't do it, you'd get sued. What's the most recent lawsuit? What was the settlement? How many people sue for this sort of thing? So there's a-- >> Such a business-minded and analytical approach to these questions, right, as opposed to just accepting the status quo. >> You just said you'd been in Silicon Valley all your life, me too, and I love innovation, and I love being inventive, and I don't want to be on the outside of all this fun. It's like, if somebody, like when I was at Netflix, if we could invent a new way of consuming entertainment, then why couldn't I invent a new way of working? >> Right, interesting. And so I wanted your take on another kind of hot trend right now, especially with the younger kids comin' up, is mission, and mission-driven companies, mission-driven opportunities, and I think, rightly or wrongly, and it's kind of like we're going to have you forever, it's a more and more important reason why people are choosing to go to certain companies, and it's so competitive here, say in the Bay Area specifically, whereas you're an employer, how should they look at this? How real is it? >> Well, first of all, before you blame them, right? Before we blame them, we have to realize that these are the children of burnt-out corporate citizens, right? And they've watched their parents toil, and come home burnt-out and upset and empty after careers in the companies that they belonged in that didn't give 'em back what they promised, right? So I think we all want mission. I don't think it's unusual for them. I think they're just asking for it. When we felt like we had to wait until later in our career to ask for stuff that mattered to us. And the other thing is, I think the companies who are building now are more capable of delivering that. And I don't think that by mission they're talking about world peace. They just want to know, how do I matter, right? And so, for me, that's teaching people how businesses work, and what the complexities are, and what the opportunities and the challenges are, and being part of that, right? So that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for every single day to go home and feel like they've changed the world, for curing, not that curing cancer's a bad thing, I think we should do that too, but we can still feel mission driven by just connecting with our customers and our products and the work that we do every day. >> All right, Patty, well I know you got to go get mic'd up for your big presentation, so thanks for takin' a few minutes of your time. >> Yeah, it was great fun. >> And I look forward to jumping into the book and getting into the day. >> Great, okay, thanks. >> She's Patty, I'm Jeff. We're at Girls in Tech, the Catalyst Conference at Bespoke in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)

>> From San Francisco, it's theCube, covering Girls in Tech Catalyst Conference. Brought to you by Girls in Tech. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at Bespoke. It's at the top of the Westfield Mall. Come on by sometime if you're doin' some shoppin', but we're here at Girls in Tech Catalyst. Really cool convention. We were in Phoenix a couple years ago, about 700 women, girls, some students that came in, and a few men as well. Really talking about great inspirational stories. Unbelievable lineup of leaders telling their stories, how they got to where they were, and sharing the information. Now we're excited to have our first guest. She's Patty McCord. She's an author of this great book, Powerful, and she used to be the head of HR, or chief, >> Talent officer. >> Talent officer at Netflix. Patty, great to see you. >> Nice to meet you, too. >> Absolutely. >> Yay. >> So you're going to be speaking in a little bit, so what is your topic on today? >> The future of work, but mostly I'm going to talk about my experience with work over the last 30 years, and that the future of work is right now. We just don't operate that way. >> So, Patty, what do people get right about culture, what do they get wrong about culture? >> What they get wrong about it is they think it's a document. They think if you write it down, you're done, and what they get wrong about it is they don't walk the walk, right? I mean, I know that's simple and cliched, but I can't tell you how many startup CEOs I meet that say, I want to be this, and I want to this. I want to be efficient, right? I want to be straightforward. Well, is there information that you hide from employees, and do you show up to meetings on time? Uuh, right? And it's also about the stories that you tell, what becomes legend, and people love those positive legend stories, and they forget that when you screw up, we'll tell that story for 10 years, right? And the third thing, I think, is people get nostalgic, and they think they can keep it, especially in little companies. Let's keep the culture the way it is, and you cannot do that if you are successful. >> It's so bizarre that people don't get the kind of do what I say, versus do what I do. I mean, this is 101, and it's such a slap in the face when a leader says one thing, and then immediately does something different. >> And you wonder, how did they end up to be this way, when their saying is break things, right? >> Well, failing up is a whole different conversation that we'll save for another day. >> But let's take failing up, right? I talked to a CEO who told me I give everybody who makes a mistake a bottle of champagne to celebrate failure. I'm like, well that's stupid. (both laugh) But it only matters if you fail up if you learn something from it, and that's the demonstrable stories that you tell, that become part of your culture, rather than you get rewarded with champagne if you screw up. >> And then the other thing we were talking about before we turned the camera on are some of these just kind of arcane, old processes that people just put 'em in it, is it-- >> Well, let's start with the fundamentals. I'm going to hire you, and you'll have a career for the rest of your life in our company. Big fat lie, has been for decades, and we still tell it, right? Second one-- >> God, people still tell that story? >> They still do tell that story. >> I've been in Silicon Valley too long. >> Yeah, me too, but I mean, I travel all over the world now, and I hear that story all the time. The second one, which I'll talk about in a minute, is we're family. You're not, right? It's not family, it's work. It's two different things. >> You pay me to come every day. >> That's right, so it's not just the processes that are archaic, like you and I talked about the annual performance review, which is we don't step back like we do with every part of the business and say, why did we do that? What's its purpose? Is it still effective, right? If it is a process to give people feedback so they'll improve their performance, you do it once a year? >> Right, like that's really going to make a big impact. >> Yeah, that's kind of dumb, and then I'm going to figure out how to pay you based on what you did or didn't do last year? And particularly for women, I mean particularly for women, the compensation systems that we have, equal pay, those are issues that they're just writing checks. How hard can this be to figure this stuff out, and when you do it, it's actually not that much money. So I'm advocating, I'm kind of on my bully pulpit here, saying people in my organizations, in HR, we need to fix the stuff that's broken, own the fact that we broke it, and stop talking about it in a language nobody understands. >> Is there some just historical legal compliance issues and stuff that keeps things like the annual performance review going, or is just minutiae? >> There's sort of this inward naval gazing thing we do, where go, well, it's best practices, 'cause everybody does it. I mean, I talk to people who say, well it's a legal requirement. No, it's not, right? We don't even ask. (laughs) If there's a law, I coach people-- >> You haven't seen it yet, and you've had the C title forever. >> I coach people all the time. When your lawyer says you can't do it, you say why, and they say, well it's against the law, and you say can I see the statute? They're written in english, right? It's not Sanskrit, right? So look at it and say, well that's not what I read it to say. Well, if you didn't do it, you'd get sued. What's the most recent lawsuit? What was the settlement? How many people sue for this sort of thing? So there's a-- >> Such a business-minded and analytical approach to these questions, right, as opposed to just accepting the status quo. >> You just said you'd been in Silicon Valley all your life, me too, and I love innovation, and I love being inventive, and I don't want to be on the outside of all this fun. It's like, if somebody, like when I was at Netflix, if we could invent a new way of consuming entertainment, then why couldn't I invent a new way of working? >> Right, interesting. And so I wanted your take on another kind of hot trend right now, especially with the younger kids comin' up, is mission, and mission-driven companies, mission-driven opportunities, and I think, rightly or wrongly, and it's kind of like we're going to have you forever, it's a more and more important reason why people are choosing to go to certain companies, and it's so competitive here, say in the Bay Area specifically, whereas you're an employer, how should they look at this? How real is it? >> Well, first of all, before you blame them, right? Before we blame them, we have to realize that these are the children of burnt-out corporate citizens, right? And they've watched their parents toil, and come home burnt-out and upset and empty after careers in the companies that they belonged in that didn't give 'em back what they promised, right? So I think we all want mission. I don't think it's unusual for them. I think they're just asking for it. When we felt like we had to wait until later in our career to ask for stuff that mattered to us. And the other thing is, I think the companies who are building now are more capable of delivering that. And I don't think that by mission they're talking about world peace. They just want to know, how do I matter, right? And so, for me, that's teaching people how businesses work, and what the complexities are, and what the opportunities and the challenges are, and being part of that, right? So that's what they're asking for. They're not asking for every single day to go home and feel like they've changed the world, for curing, not that curing cancer's a bad thing, I think we should do that too, but we can still feel mission driven by just connecting with our customers and our products and the work that we do every day. >> All right, Patty, well I know you got to go get mic'd up for your big presentation, so thanks for takin' a few minutes of your time. >> Yeah, it was great fun. >> And I look forward to jumping into the book and getting into the day. >> Great, okay, thanks. >> She's Patty, I'm Jeff. We're at Girls in Tech, the Catalyst Conference at Bespoke in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (laid-back electronic music)

(upbeat jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a Cube conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today for a CUBE conversation. You know, every place we go, a lot of the conversation is about the future of work. And oftentimes it's really in the context of the tools, whether Slack, or Asana, or Facebook Groups, everybody's trying to get into this. But there's a lot more to the future of work and is really about talent, to getting talent, a hyper-competitive talent space, it's about culture, and ethics, and morals, and especially some of the stuff that we've seen recently, with what happened at Wells Fargo, and obviously what's goin' on at Facebook. There's a much more complicated part of the story in terms of the people side, and we're excited to have somebody who's applying kind of AI, and all the technology that we talk about all the time with the shows to culture, and so for the first time, we'd like to welcome Mitch Gudgeon. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of TalentFit AI. Mitch, great to see you. >> Hey, nice to see you Jeff. Thanks for having me here today. >> Absolutely! So before we get into it, because a lot of fun stuff, just give people kind of the quick overview of what you guys are all about at TalentFit AI. >> Yeah, definitely. So we make it easy to find the right person for your context, so your culture of your organization. Basically we take an evidence-based approach to calibrating your culture, and then quantifying culture fit, so you're actually reduce bias for the hiring process, at least through the phases that we take you through, and then ultimately you end up saving time, energy, money hiring and retaining the right people. >> So it's both the culture at the company, and then then it's the culture for the applicant, and trying to make a match. >> Yeah, basically matching their ideal cultures, so what they want to get, their sort of fundamental values, their needs, the norms that they have, and then matching that to what the company actually has internally, not what's necessarily written on the wall for-- >> Right. (laughs) I was going to say. I would imagine the first big point of conversation, what so you do a culture assessment at a company, do you come at it from the company point of view? Or more from the employee applicant point of view? >> Yeah, so we actually start by calibrating the culture by understanding what the culture is across the organization based on employee feedback. From that, we're able to extract that. We use some validation stuff, based on performance, based on, you know, engagement scores, other things like that. And then from there, anybody's an applicant who's applying, we can actually help them actually, or help the company actually assess, do they actually fit this company culture or not-- >> Right. So I would imagine it's kind of like reputation, right? You think your reputation is not what you say it is, it's what people talk about when you're not in the room. And I would imagine when you're doing kind of a culture assessment, there's one just figuring it out, but I got to guess that there's a lot of times where the culture data that you collect based on real data, doesn't necessarily match what maybe the leadership team of the company thinks it is. >> Yeah, it's actually funny. That's kind of the inspiration for why I even started this company in the first place, is I actually finished my MBA and joined a company, and for me it was like, we went through the hiring process, did all the due diligence, and realized once I joined the team that, my ideal culture wasn't exactly what the culture was in the organization, not saying it was a bad culture, just saying it wasn't the right place for me. >> Right. >> And (mumbles) you know had the right personality traits and what not to do well in the role, at the same time I wasn't able to actually sort of feel that I got what I needed from the company, and then probably from me too, so, you know, it's one of those things. We help you basically not go into the wrong situation where you're not in a good place to succeed too. >> Right. And do you talk about a bunch of things that kind of determine culture, so there's the plaque on the wall, you know, as you walk in the front door, but it's really, and you outline it a bunch on your... it's the norms, it's the behavior, it's how people are rewarded. So there's a bunch of real discrete things that you guys can measure through your process that actually define culture in a way that you can put numbers on it, and you can compare Culture A to Culture B. >> Yeah. >> What do you see as some of the most important things, or where do people usually miss between what they think is the culture and where they execute the culture? >> Yeah, it kind of varies from company to company. So we use a thing called the cultural signature, this is saying that you and I can both sign a check, hopefully both our checks are going to actually pass and they won't bounce, but your signature is no better than mine, mine is no better than yours, it's just unique, right? To your own situation. And sometimes you'll see that leadership especially may not be in touch with what the culture of the organization actually is based on their employees' feedback. And so this is what we kind of do, it's kind of like understanding what the culture is, seeing those gaps between what leadership thinks and what it actually is, and then leadership, if they do care about culture, which most of our customers would, they can start making those appropriate changes to get to their aspirational state if they want to. >> Right. And then when we first started were getting ready to do this interview and I was thinking to myself, well wait, if you're just bringing in people that kind of fit the culture, are you just kind of going birds of a feather, are you missing the opportunity of what's so important right now in terms of diversity, diversity of opinion, diversity of background, diversity of point of view. But you're saying personality fit and culture fit are two very different things. So how do you look at the difference between personality and getting diversity in the company, which is good, versus getting cultural misfit, which is not good? >> Yeah exactly. So yeah they're definitely very different things, and there are some ties to it, but you think of people often associate with culture fit as hey I can sit down and have a beer with you or we talked to a couple of companies like hey, are you a gamer? Then you'll be able to work with us because you fit our culture. But that's not really what it is, right? At the end of the day it's about these fundamental values that you have within your organization. You know, what you actually want out of the organization, and that it's matching your needs. So and we actually have an advisor who's one of the top diversity inclusion people in Canada for a global organization, and she's also helping us through this process of ensuring auditing our algorithm, making sure that we're taking the right steps, and managing and ensuring that the we're tracking demographic data, so that we actually do not have bias in our algorithm at the end of the day. So, it's kind of where were going. >> Yeah, so I'm curious about where the bounds of the culture in terms of number of people, if you will. So, there's obviously, do we fit as an employer and employee? You get along with your boss, you have a culture. There's your group that you're intimately involved with, who you work with with day to day, whether that's, I don't know, six people, 10 people, I'm curious if there's a natural bound, and then maybe you're part of a department, and obviously if you work at a company like Amazon, just to pick a name out of the hat, they have over 600,000 people. So where the limits of culture, or can they successfully span from all the way at the top, all the way down to those little micro groups? >> Yeah, so usually we think of it as there's core culture to the organization, and that's kind of things that are aligned across the entire organization, right? So you think of person organization fit is how they define it in their research. You get into things like person group fit, so this could be the specific team you work on, and there's also cultures with the sub-cultures in the teams, so the way we've built our algorithm is actually taking and being inspired by pieces of research, that actually look at group fit, look at organization fit, and then be able to match people effectively sort of both of those. >> So you try to look at it all. But at the end of the day, is your probability of success within an organization more determined by that kind of close intimate group? Or the bigger group because then maybe you find a different path if that immediate group doesn't work for you. >> Yes. >> What do you find? Yes, so right now we're still pretty early stage, right? So we're going to be tracking stats and seeing how people actually fit to the overall organization, how they fit to the groups. Right now we're doing matching to specific groups and teams, because there are sub-cultures within the organization. Those teams will still have those core values of the organization too, but things like their leader may be a bit different, the way they manage their people, right? So that's kind of what we're looking at right now. >> And do you find that senior leadership really understands the importance of culture? Because you mention it in some of your posts on your website, and some of the articles that you reference that culture can be a great asset, right? Then view Patty McCord with the work she did at Netflix is, you know, kind of legendary, and everyone goes to that deck, it's 127 page slides. I don't like slides, I went through the whole deck, it's amazing. But it can also be a real negative. It can be a real problem, and does leadership understand that to the point where they're making the investments to make sure that culture is a asset and not a liability? >> Yeah, and I think it's changing a lot. I think it used to be leadership kind of set the direction, and you kind of had to listen to what was going on, and you had to abide by the rules of the culture, and if you didn't you're kind of gone. You know, I think that's shifting a lot, because people are more attracted to organizations that they know they fit the culture, they feel they align with the culture. They're more likely to accept job offers, they're likely to actually take a pay cut even, a lot of the research is showing. So I think those are factors that are coming into the equation now, and companies are realizing that if we want to attract the top talent, great. Everyone can pay X amount of money, right, for a candidate to join. Now at the same time, if you're being recruited by five different firms, and they're all offering the same pay, what's your differentiator, right? And so culture can be a differentiator and people, and especially leaders I think are realizing it can be a competitive advantage, right? It's going back to this whole talk of like culture eats strategy for breakfast, right? >> Right. >> And I think that's an important thing to think about is that I think companies are buying into that more than ever now. >> Right. But ultimately it's about execution, right? You got to execute it, you got to walk the walk, and talk the talk. And clearly, when it works well, it works really well, and one of the examples we use around here, just because it's so easy and in your face is the Warriors, right? Perennial losing organization, Lose lose lose lose lose. They get a change at the top, before you know it, they're the premiere kind of brand in the NBA right now, and that's really been top down, driven by Joe Lacob, all the way down to the players. But I wonder, is it more of a stick or more of a carrot? Is it because employers now have to do this, because the employment market is so tight? Is it because they're trying to get the younger kids who are coming out of the school who are much more mission driven than maybe I was when I got out of school? I just wanted to get a job and get going. Or are they really thinking more holistically, kind of lifetime value of that employment relationship with these people? >> I think it's a bit of both, to be honest. I think they obviously see the benefit from the hey we can attract the top people here, but they also see the business benefit of it now too, right? And I think that's the one thing that is often forgotten in the past. And I love the example of the Warriors, right? And I think this is one thing that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts is another... I like using these kind of phrases, right? >> Right. >> But the Warriors is a great example because they have five A players on their team, if you want to call them A players, and they're able to work together for the most part, although earlier in this season they had some issues with their culture, and if you probably look at the winning record there, it was actually pretty low probably during those when they're having issues internally. So I think it's one of those things. You can also help players even level up, so it's like you don't have to recruit that A player every time, you can actually make a B Player on the right team that they fit into turn into this kind of A player in that situation and that context. >> Yeah, last question, before I let you go, because I think it's another interesting thing that's happening is this blurring between professional life and your regular life, and we've seen it with hours, right? Nobody's working eight to five anymore, because you've got meetings with Europe, you've got meetings with Asia Pacific, you've got meetings with the East Coast from here, so people are on and off the meetings all the time, you're on and off your phone, you're getting Slack notifications all through the day. And at the same time, people want their employees to be engaged and feel part of that. They want them to retweet the company line, but they won't necessarily give them the rights to retweet in the name of the company. So how do you see the motivation of people and this blurring between professional and personal life, and yet companies want employees that are bought in, that are kind of emotionally vested, into these mission driven cultures? Do you see more conflict there? Is it working, or what should people be thinking about? >> Yeah I think it really comes down to what people want at the end of the day too, right? If you don't want to be in tapped in all the time, then you probably don't want to fit with that, or you're probably not going to fit with that kind of organizational culture. And there's lots of other companies out there that may be not like that, for instance. So I think it's one of those things. You really just have to understand like what do you value as an individual? What is a company's value? And then, how do those things align for you? And do you want to be on your phone 24/7, or do you want to... and have the flexibility you know to be able to take holidays when you want? Or do you want that nine to five job that's more structured? And so what we're doing is giving that transparency to both the job seeker and the company now, to say like hey is it a fit right up front? And if it is, okay let's start taking you through the hiring process, and then if you don't? That's okay with us, because we're both not going to benefit from this. It's a two-sided street, right? So it's building that transparency and helping people find a place that they'll ideally match with. >> Right, well Mitch it's really an interesting story, and we didn't really talk about deep into the AI, but you guys are using big science and big data to try to basically increase the probability of success, because a miss is expensive for both sides. >> Yes, it's really costly, right? It's, you know some of the estimates can be up to three times salary is what it's costs when you make a bad hire. Companies, I think it was like 85% of companies say they've made a bad hire in the last year. And from the job seekers' side it's like they're more likely to accept job offers, even at lower pay from companies that they feel they align with the values of the organization. It would be pretty nice now to be able to say like hey, you actually align and the data shows this too. This is all based in top tier research too. >> Right Mitch, well thanks for sharing your story. We'll keep an eye as you keep growing and best of luck to you and the team. >> Awesome, thanks Jeff. I really appreciate you having me today. >> Alright. He's Mitch, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat jazzy music)

(funky music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with theCUBE, we're having a CUBE conversation in the studio, we're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season, so it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. We're excited to have a new guest who's never been on theCUBE before, he's Danial Hazariki, the CMO of Reflektive. Danial, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So you guys are working in a cool space, kind of the new age HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture, which I think was pretty early days in kind of saying throw out traditional annual reviews, kind of throw out regulations around expense reports, throw out a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis and we really need to kind of bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely yeah, a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high-performing, and that's the big tagline for her, is high-performance culture. I think it's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines, because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not, and by knowing that, we can have faith that we trust them, that they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. So, I think we sit right at the center of this, and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you, how long you been around, some of the basics. >> Yeah, so we were founded in late 2014, we have three co-founders, Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmie Tyrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves, they realized that this was a gap in managing workforces, and, you know, classic model of technical founder, and then more of a product percent, and they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? 'Cause there's a ton of HR applications out there. There's big ones like WorkDay, you know, who's been very successful on the SAAS model. What did they see that was the big hole, even though there's all these huge traditional HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah, so what happened was there's a five-ish year old burst into framework, they talk about this. Systems and engagement, and systems of record. And so these tools that you mention, they were great at helping catalog what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required. But what happened was the world changed, things in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit, and these tools struggled to handle the day to day and didn't live where people worked, and those are big gaps. So they saw this and said okay well, there's something here where we can go and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high-performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point to get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah, I think that ultimately, there is some form of review that happens, and they built that functionality. What was really interesting to the market was actually their concept of realtime feedback, and building the mechanisms by which you could actually bring that into that platform, and actually factor that in when you're doing interviews. This eliminates things like recency bias, things that, hey, a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last three months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it in March of that year. So we're helping solve for that, and they saw great results doing that. >> Right, so you've got all types of little apps, is the right word, solutions, or kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people, to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So I wondered if you could dive into some of those applications and what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah, so the modern kind of version of what we do, 'cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering, we also have an engagement offering, and we also have a people intelligence offering, and these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all of those people that you just talked about. And so when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but we believe that employees need feedback in the moment, they need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager in what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work, and that's why we do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there, how are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And then, last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions, and that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, so there's a lot of different layers to the story. But the one when I was first preparing for this interview, I'm like, oh my goodness, you were right, another tool, another desktop app, I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open with our sales force and Outlook and all these things are open. But you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack, as opposed to kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work, and how has that kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally, yeah, I mean this is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from mobile applications, and games specifically. So they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And taking that lends to what they said. Okay, we really do need to encourage adoption, how do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job, like email. Others are kind of optional. We're honest with ourselves, we say, hey, we're in the optional category, how do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So we said okay, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack, where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail, we're going to show up in Outlook, we're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights I talked about. >> Is it a popup, is it some encouragement when I do some activity, say, with you on a project? Oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Danial? Oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Danial, how does the mechanics work, and then what have you seen in terms of adoption? What works and what doesn't work? >> Yeah, I mean it definitely gets traction, because I think specifically Slack, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. >> It's as the way you said, very familiar. >> There you go right, so I think from that perspective, it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company and in channel, you can also go and input recognition for other people, write there at mention, and just kind of invoke that. >> So are they kind of channels then within Slack around- >> Recognition can be a channel, but the actual input of feedback, it can do that right from the beginning of our, yeah. >> So interesting to talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? 'Cause those are two very different words and two very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point, and it's an ongoing debate, how do you name these two different things? Frankly, recognition to the broader market ends up being, more or less, positive feedback that you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. But there's an important distinction here, because there's also negative feedback, and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive, but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with a broader organization. So we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that in every single use case, and so that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in, is that you can go public, private, public and also broadcast to the whole company, and we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right, so I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management, and how does that kind of module work and or how does that tie back to some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your Jira project and are these things integrated, or is it kind of a stand alone, and does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal? How does that piece of it work? >> So the way we find the highest performance cultures doing this is they do kind of adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly, I think that's kind of the favored happy medium right now. And that does start with company level goals. Then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual, or sub team goals. And all of these people have, you can do smart goals, you can do objectives and key results, you can do whatever format you want, and it's pretty flexible as a platform. But all of that cascades down, and you can coordinate between people, and get visibility of public goals, private goals, and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency on the platform. >> And in terms of your customers and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily an individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of a carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change, and yours is a tool to give them an avenue to the new way, or is it kind of new and provocative, and we've been doing annual reviews since my dad's dad's dad, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception, and how is the market changing? >> Totally, like with anything, either tech adoption life cycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now, and some have gotten to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that. Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback, they want to know what their goals are clearly, and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And so that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters, just saying we built something that's ideally suited to the way you need to evolve. Part of the task of any innovative technology is we have to go educate the market, too. We know that universally, people are struggling to attain talent, what we do to educate them is inform them of here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research, HBR articles, we've seen gallop research, we've signed all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. And so the more we do our job as marketing to make sure the market understands that, I think the more reflective we'll see success. >> That's funny, in one of Patty's recent medium posts, she talks about foosball tables, and billiard tables, it's like that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. They look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job, but a lot of other things, that drive, happiness and retention in the super competitive market that's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely, especially in the case of Patty Mccord, I mean, she's indexing everything, again, around, you want to have the highest-performing people stay, and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has espoused many times is that the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand, they love to have feedback so they can improve and be better, and so you can see how there's a lot of parallels here about what she's talking about that high performing cultures do, and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right, what about the pesky lawyers that are always saying there's always compliance issues, and we're still operating off of laws that were established before, and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it. >> Yeah, what I've actually found is, there are specific customers, even of a size of Air BnB who will highlight that we helped them combat bias, and the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews. And the way we do this, is I think ultimately, the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say it's the end of the year now, and you just remember what happened in the past few months. You're ignoring all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, that recency bias they call is eliminated. And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers, because we can say this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right, we have to train among contract year concept, you're supposed to turn it up the last month so they forget about the crappy stuff you did earlier in the year and do well. So Dan, before I let you go, you've been around a little while, you've been in the valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious kind of as you've come to Reflektive and been there now. What was the biggest surprise entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah, I think what was most interesting and actually kind of exciting was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through 10 years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now, I'm seeing more and more people scientists, I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science, and I think a lot of it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have really started paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier? And that's really interesting for me. >> Awesome, well thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing the story. >> Absolutely. >> All right. He's Danial, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios, we'll see you next time, thanks for watching. (funky music)

(upbeat bright music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicone Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with The Cube. We are having a Cube Conversation here in the studio. We're just about ready to hit the crazy wave that is the conference season. So, it's great to still have some time to do some studio stuff before we hit the road. And we're excited to have a new guest that's never been on the cube before. He is Daniel Hazarika, the CMO of Reflektive. Daniel, great to meet you. >> Great to meet you. >> So, you guys are working in the cool space. Kind of the new age, HR management for lack of a better term. We've had Patty Mccord on before, who obviously was seminal in kind of the Netflix culture. Which was, I think, pretty early days and kind of saying throw out, throw out traditional annual reviews. Kind of, throw out regulations around expense reports. Throw out, kind of, a lot of these traditional mechanisms to manage people and really say, you know, what are we managing people to? And we should be giving them feedback on a regular basis, and we really need to, kind of, bring this into the modern era. And that's smack in the middle of what you guys do. >> Absolutely, yeah. I mean a big part of what we do is managing employees to be high performing. And that's the big tagline for her, is high performance culture. >> Right. >> It's critical to have, as part of that, a more active and ongoing role with your employees. That's why they can do things like remove expense report guidelines. Because they know we're on the pulse of whether this person is actually performing or not. And, by knowing that, we can have faith that they're, we trust them. That they'll do the right thing when it comes to deciding on what they spend on. >> Right. >> So, I think we sit right at the center of this and we're really excited to be a part of it. >> So, let's back up a little bit and just give everyone kind of the 411 on Reflektive. >> Absolutely. >> How many people are you? How long you've been around? >> Yeah. >> Some of the basics. >> Yeah. So, we were founded in late 2014. We have 3 co-founders; Rajeev Behera, Erick Tai, and Jimmy Tyrrell. They more or less were actually people managers themselves. They realized this was a gap in, you know, in managing work forces and, you know, classic model of technical founder and then more of a product person and then they got together and built this really cool tool. >> So what was the big hole? Cause there's are a ton of HR applications out there. >> Absolutely. >> There's big ones likes Workday, you know, whose done been very successful on the SaaS Model. What did they see that was the big hole even though there's all these huge traditional kind of HR applications? >> Absolutely, yeah. So, what happened was, there is a fivish year-old Berson framework, they talk about this systems of engagement and systems of record, right? >> Right. >> And so these tools that you mention that were great at helping catalogue what happens in a business, and do all the compliance processes required, right? But what happened was the world changed. Things, in terms of social media, the way people were getting information, the pace of things accelerated quite a bit and these tools struggled to handle the day to day. And didn't live where people worked. And, those are big gaps. So, they saw this and said, okay, well there is something here where we can go in and insert ourselves in the flow of people's work and help them actually get the information they need to be high performing. >> So, was the entry point the annual review? What was kind of the entry point >> Yeah. >> To get people to think about HR in a different way and to adopt the technology? >> Yeah. >> I think, I think that ultimately there is some form of review that happens and they built that functionality. But, what was really interesting to the market was that actually the concept of real time feedback and the mechanisms, building the mechanisms, by which you could actually bring that into that platform. And actually factor that in when you're doing reviews, right? There's, this eliminates things like recency bias things that, hey a review is happening at the end of the year, I'm going to remember what happened the last 3 months. I'm not going to remember that you killed it, you know, in March of that year. So, we're helping solve for that. And they've saw great results doing that. >> Right. So, you've got all types of kind of little, I don't know apps is the right word >> Sure. >> Solutions. Or, you know, kind of activities that enable people both as the employee as well as the manager as well as the HR people to have kind of this ongoing back and forth relationship. So, I was wondering if you could dive into some of those applications and what's, what's working really well that's different than things used to be? >> Yeah. So, the modern kind of version of what we do, cause things have changed much over the past few years, we have a core kind of performance management offering. We also have an engagement offering and we also have a people intelligence offering. And these are the three pillars by which we kind of enable all those people that you just talked about. And so, when we go back to the performance piece, there's many different components, but, we believe that employees need feedback in the moment. They need a way to also do annual reviews. They need a way to set goals and be clear with their manager on what those are and what progress is. And we also believe that those things have to exist in the flow of day to day work and that's why do things like have a Slack integration, integrate with Gmail, Outlook, all these different kind of places where people actually live day to day. >> Right. >> Then, you know, the other layers that I spoke about are engagement. We like to be able to do broad surveys to companies and, you know, get a pulse on high level, what is the emotion out there? How are people feeling about management? How are people feeling about, you know, even the snacks in the kitchen? Simple stuff like that. >> Right. >> And, then last but not least, all of that information has to feed into somewhere so that the management of an organization can get the insights they need to make decisions. And that's where the people intelligence comes in. >> Okay, this is a lot of different layers to the story. But the one that, when I was first preparing for this interview, and like, oh my goodness, another tool, right? >> Right, yeah. >> Another desktop app. I forget what the statistics are of all the tabs that we have open >> Yeah. >> With our Salesforce and Outlook and all these things are open. But, you guys took an interesting approach, 'cause you actually integrated with some of the apps that you presume I have open like Slack as opposed to, you know, kind of forcing me to have that one more tab. How does that work and how has that, you know, kind of impacted adoption? >> Totally yeah. This is where the foundations of our company kind of come into play. So, our founders came from Mobile Applications. They knew, and games specifically, so they know how to optimize for things like active users daily, monthly, all that, right? And, taking that lens to it, they said, okay, we really do need to encourage adoption. How do we make that happen? To your point, too many tools are open. Some are required to do your job like email. Others are kind of optional. We're, we're, you know, honest with ourselves. We say, hey, we're in the optional category. How do we solve for that? How do we still get people to use this? So, we said, we're going to plug ourselves into Slack where people actually communicate day to day. We're going to show up in Gmail. We're going to show up in Outlook. We're going to go to all these different places where people are already working. We actually even integrate with Jira, the engineering tool. And we said, that's the way we'll actually get the information into our system that we need, and then we can service all those insights that we talked about. >> Is it like a, is it a pop-up? Is it some encouragement when I do some activity say, say with you on a project, you know, oh Jeff, by the way, do you have any feedback for Daniel? Or, oh Jeff, by the way, somebody's looking for feedback on Daniel. Or, I mean, how does the mechanics work and, then, what have you seen in terms of adoption what works, what doesn't work? >> Yeah. I mean, it definitely gets traction. Because, I think, specifically Slack, and, you know, we're a Silicon Valley company, a lot of our earlier customers were Silicon Valley companies, and they all use Slack. It's pretty >> As do we. >> Yeah. There you go, right? So, I think from that perspective it's really easy to use. You can see all the active recognition, for example, happening in your company. And, in channel, you can also go in and input recognition for other people right there just at mention and, kind of, invoke that. >> So, are they kind of channels then within Slack, around? >> Recognition can be a channel but the actual input of feedback you can do that right from the keyboard, yeah. >> So, interesting, talk about feedback versus recognition. How does that play out in the real world? Cause those are two very different words and two different, very different motivations. >> You bring up a great, great point and it's in an ongoing debate, like how do you, kind of, name these two different things? Frankly, recognition, to the broader market, ends up being more or less positive feedback, right? That you feel like you want to put a public stamp on. >> Right. >> But, there's an important distinction here because there's also negative feedback and there's also just feedback that people want to give that's positive but they don't necessarily want to share that with the entire world, or with the broader organization. So, we wanted to create a safe space for them to be able to do that at every single, in every single use case. And, so, that's what, that's where the delineation between recognition and feedback comes in is that you can go public, private, you know, public and also broadcast to the whole company. And we wanted to give people the avenue to do all those things. >> Right. So, I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about goals and goal management. How does that kind of module work and/or how does that tie back to, kind of, some of the corporate goals and corporate initiatives? Can you tie it back to your project and are these things integrated or is it, kind of, a stand-alone? Does it operate like an annual goal or a quarterly goal or, you know, how does that piece of it work? >> Yeah. So, the way that we find, you know, the highest performance cultures doing this, they do, kind of, adjust goals on an ongoing basis. Ideally quarterly. I think that's probably the favored, kind of, happy medium right now. >> Okay. >> And, that does start with company level goals, then it goes to departmental, then it goes to individual or team, sub-team, goals. And, all of these people have, you know, we can call, you can do SMART goals, you know, you can do objectives and key results. You can do whatever format you want and it's pretty flexible as a platform but all of that cascades down and you can go work, you know, coordinate between people and get visibility. You can have public goals, private goals and that's part of our whole commitment to transparency in the platform. >> In terms of your customers, and their adoption at a corporate level, not necessarily the individual, is it more of a stick or is it more of carrot? Are people figuring out that they need to change and yours is the tool to give them an avenue to the new way? Or, is it kind of new and provocative and, we've been doing annual reviews since, since my dad's dad's dad, you know, I'm not quite sure about this ongoing thing. What's kind of the reception and how's the market changing? >> Totally. Like with anything, you know, either tech adoption or lifecycle, a lot of our early adopters have just picked up on the fact that the market for talent is extremely competitive now. And some have got to different maturity levels in understanding what they need to do to deal with that, right? Our earliest adopters, they just got it right away. They said, like, we, our workforce is asking for more in the moment feedback. They want to know what their goals are clearly and be able to measure against them and be able to go and point back, hey, I actually achieved that, or I did not. And, so, that has helped us a lot with the earlier adopters. Just saying, like, we built something that's ideally suited to what you need, they way you need to evolve. >> Right. >> Part of, I mean, the task of any kind of innovative technology is we have to go educate the market too. We know that universally people are struggling to retain talent. What we do to educate them is to inform them of, here's actually what the workforce is looking for. We've done a ton of research. HBR articles, we've seen Gallup Research, we've seen all sorts of stuff that tells you the world has changed, the workforce is expecting certain things, and we've built something around those needs. >> Right. >> And, so, the more we do our job as marketing, you know, to make sure the market understands that, I think the more Reflektive will see success. >> It's funny in one of Patty's recent media posts, she talks about foosball tables and billiard tables, like, that's not what drives employee happiness and satisfaction. I mean, they look good, I guess, on the tour before you take the job but, I don't know, there's a lot of other things that drive happiness and retention in this super competitive market. That's not the ping pong table. >> Absolutely. Especially in the case of Patty McCord, I mean, she's indexing everything around, you want to have the highest performing people stay and you don't necessarily care to actively manage the ones who are not. And what she has, you know, espoused many times is that, when, the highest performing people actually love this. They love that there's transparency around the business value they're driving. They love to know exactly where they stand. They love to have feedback so they can improve and be better. And, so, you can see how there's a lot of, like, parallels here between what's she's talking about that high performing cultures do and what the platform that we've built enables. >> Right. What about the pesky lawyers that are saying there are all these compliance issues and we're still, we're still operating off of laws that were established before and this is a little bit funky and we're not really sure how to deal with it? >> Yeah. I mean, what we've actually found is, so, there's specific customers, even of the size of Airbnb, who will highlight that we helped them combat bias. And the way we do this, and evidence that they are not biased in the way they do reviews, and the way we do this is, I think the concept, is ultimately the concept of real time feedback. Because this stuff is being logged as it's happening, no one can say, oh, it's the end of the year now and you just remember what happened in the past few months, you're ignoring all my great, you know, all my great work that happened before that. This is not fair, You know, that recency bias they call it, is eliminated. >> And that actually, in the end, helps with the lawyers because we can say, this was all cataloged in the moment as opposed to way later. >> Right. We have to train among contract to your concept. You're supposed to turn it up the last month. So, they forget about the crappy stuff that you did earlier in the year. >> Exactly. >> And do well. So, Dan, before I let you go, just, you've been around a little while, you've been in the Valley, you've been at a number of startups, you've been here for about a year, I'm just curious, kind of, as you've come to Reflektive and been there now, what was the biggest surprise, kind of, entering this space, entering this company that you didn't necessarily expect now that you've been there for a little bit? >> Yeah. I think what was most interesting, actually kind of exciting, was to observe how similar the transformation that HR is going through right now is to the transformation that marketing went through ten years ago. I'm seeing the movement to being more data driven, to getting active information on how campaigns are running, all this stuff. That evolution is happening in HR right now. I'm seeing, you know, more and more people scientists. I'm seeing more and more people who are turning people management into a science. And, I think that a lot it has to do with record low unemployment. The market for labor got so competitive that people have started really paying attention to this as a problem and trying to understand better outside of just simple compliance things. How can we actually actively manage our workforce into being high performing and happier. That's really interesting for me. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day and sharing your story. >> Absolutely. >> Alright. He's Daniel, I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. We're having a Cube Conversation at our Palo Alto studios. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (exciting music)