How to Use a Startup Mindset at a Large Company with Timothy Wu

Yeah. when I joined, the company was maybe 2000 and I’m pretty sure they’re double that by now. So easy.

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting because you can definitely employ the startup mindset in—well, can’t say for every single job that you’re doing—but even for a large company like Square, I actually did feel that the startup and growth mindset was a very strong part of the culture. And I think the way that I want to abstract that is just ownership—ownership of projects, ownership of problems, and ownership of new processes and ways that you can improve certain things. And what I mean by that is just that there’s actually a phrase I did pick up from a few of my mentors and teammates—”moving the couch.”

There’s a sort of sub team value thing, and it was one of those things that we think about. And the analogy is: “Okay, you’re in a hallway, you see a couch right in front of you, what do you do?” You have four options: you can move it to clear a pathway for people behind you, even though there might not be anybody behind you; you can hop over it and assume that everybody behind you can hop over the same way that you do. Or you could sit there, complain about it all day, so maybe just three options. So, complain about the couch. You ask management, “Hey, can somebody get this out of my way?” So I think the mentality there is: if you see anything where you do have some free reign to take ownership of a problem or an issue. It doesn’t mean that you have to completely own it, but it’s surfacing it, calling it out in a way that’s productive.

And it’s just: are you employing a mindset where you’re, “Okay, I’m going to call something out, I’m going to surface it to the right people, and I’m going to try to do my best to help fix this, or propose a new solution for it?” So I think that proactiveness is really what I enjoy. And again, it’s not that it wasn’t there at Square—I learned this mentality and this exact phrasing from my team over there. But I think in the startup environment, it’s a little bit broader; you have less of a specialized role on your team.

So for me, transparently, head of growth means everything under the sun related to helping to grow the customer base, bar product. So that’s marketing, that’s product growth, and all the way into the weeds on building my team. I play a lot of HR management as well, keeping my team motivated around me, right? So as startups, you have a lot of latitude; you get thrown into conversations that in a larger company you would frankly say, “That’s not my issue.” It’s not even my department.

But in a startup, you’re working cross-functionally across departments—that’s kind of what I missed. I do enjoy having these really deep conversations with my compliance team or my engineering team on how certain things can or cannot work, right? So that—some aspects that I really just gravitate towards often.

Yeah. Just my final thought on that is tying it to your analogy: for me, it’s not necessarily about taking on every single project that comes in front of you, but even the nuance of “Okay, are you gonna sit there and complain about it or actually make it happen?” Suggestions: you don’t have to be the person ushering in the solution. You just need to at least give it a little thought and surface it to the right person, right? It’s teamwork—as long as exactly who can solve this problem or make this process better is identified. That’s kind of half the battle, right?

I mean, very important, I think, especially as I’ve seen it, I started off with just me and one other person on the marketing team. We’ve grown it to four currently—oh, sorry, five currently—and then we’re going to be looking to almost double the team again in the next quarter or so, pushing to eight or 10. I think the more the team grows, you’re going to end up with a lot more work to do. I think what happens is: Tim’s team is growing; we’re gonna throw even more stuff onto their plates. It’s important to me to loop back to your analogy—I don’t want to take on every single monkey that comes across my desk. I only have 24 hours a day. I have to at least sleep for a reasonable six to eight, probably debatable for a lot of people, but I have limited bandwidth and attention. And frankly, if I take too many things on as an individual, things will slip. That’s for sure. Nobody’s superhuman. They can’t possibly just get every single thing done that comes across your desk, right?

So that’s why it’s been important for me to look for people with that really proactive mindset. The way I’ve hired and assessed people for positions—not just here at Hatch but on other teams—is the way I think about it: your best hire is going to be the person who does the exact same skill set that you’re looking for. They have domain expertise; they just know how to do the thing; they can build out process systems. But if you can’t find that perfect mixture of the person because of availability or market whatever, the next is just somebody who’s done something similar but also is showing some sort of inclination to figure things out and make it happen. And usually, what I like to say is, “Okay, well, your expertise is not in the exact thing I’m looking for.” But if you’re open and willing to learn, and you’re at least giving me answers or showing me through your case study interview, projects, and deliverables—doing the research and shoring up your gaps in knowledge—that, to me, is almost as important as that person who’s perfectly suited.

And I think, with how quickly things change in the marketing growth world, it’s a little hard sometimes to actually find the perfect person. For me, I’m looking for performance marketers who work in FinTech and learned how to test new channels, right? And reasonably speaking, they’re either at my competitors and they’re already there, or there’s somebody who probably doesn’t have that exact check-off. So again, it’s more than just finding smart people. It’s all about finding people who are motivated, who are willing to learn, and who are willing to take that proactive attitude at full force.

Yeah. I think what’s really worked well for me, and just to be super honest, in transparent, I haven’t founded a company before, but I have worked as a first business hire, a secondary business hire in really small teams.

And while what I’ve found is that, as long as we have a consistent communication plan on what exactly we’re trying to accomplish, and how my role and my other teams can rally and ladder back up to that objective, that’s super important to me.

So I think a lot of things I’ve really taken from previous companies is communicating often—not that we need to be in one-hour all hands every day, but at the very least, having some weekly cadence of either meeting up or having some sort of broadly communicated event is super helpful just to keep people in the know.

I think, if anything, communication is absolutely for that.

Oh, dead or alive, three people. Let me think about this for a second. Oh, man.

Yeah, I’ll probably take it a little bit of an easy way out. And I do think President Obama is somebody who I would probably want to sit down and have a conversation with. Actually, I’ll dovetail that. I think Anthony Bourdain is actually somebody who I’d love to have dinner with, as I was a really big fan of his work and everything. And I do think that the third person would be my grandma. So, that’s awesome. Been a few years now, so it’s not super sensitive for me, but when you have that strong emotional connection with somebody, it’s an easy answer for me.

Yeah, actually, think in terms of books. James Clear, actually one of my favorite sort of writers for just general motivation. I think the book was Atomic Habits. Actually really liked his approach for just kind of breaking down your decisioning process for making hard decisions being productive. I think a lot of times, people just think of productivity as an all or nothing thing, but it’s truly either you’re lazy or you’re not, which is a whole nother thing. But I think what I liked about Atomic Habits, actually, was that he really breaks down the decision process into different frameworks, right? So even something as simple as saying, I want to remove all distractions, and taking away a lot of the sort of things in your physical space; if you have clutter, you’re going to be really distracted with everything, right? So part of it is also about creating an environment around you to allow you to focus a bit more. So that’s actually been my favorite book I’ve read recently.

Yeah. Just as a clarifying note, our URL is hatchcard.com—that’s actually the website for us, and our company name is Hatch itself.

I would say, to get in contact with us, the website is the easiest place to see what we’re doing. If anybody wants to get in touch with me directly, I would prefer not to give out my direct email address.

But Hatch is a really good place to go because it reaches all the folks on our marketing team. Usually I’m the first one to see it, that sort of thing.