![]() “I’m thinking of the new C-suite as the founding team of the next phase of the company.” Liu says he tried to humanize the new C-suite and make sure employees didn't know just their résumé but also the person taking the job-their personalities, talents, goals and non-work-stuff interests. Other managers feel slighted at being passed over for the promotion or insecure that a CEO had to look beyond the company to fill a need. ![]() Liu met a few final candidates in San Francisco and L.A., where they’d go on outdoor walks, but some hires, like CPO Peter Deng, were done entirely virtual-even today, the two have never met in person.Ī daunting challenge of bringing in a new slate of outside executives is that it causes uncertainty to current employees-some worry about how the new boss will impact their jobs and their future trajectories. It’s more fluid and organic than hiring for a more technical position.”Ĭovid complicated recruiting. “They all have the basic skills needed for the job, and it becomes focused on what they are looking to do in the role and the chemistry with the company. There are many different archetypes for each role,” says Liu. “None of these were cookie-cutter jobs, and each interview helped evolve my understanding of what the job needed. He says each meeting helped inform him about the type of executive he needed. Liu and the board interviewed dozens of candidates for each role. “It requires a leap of faith to trust my conviction, that we brought in a person you can learn from, and that we wouldn’t have made the hire unless the person worked at an amazing level.” “Take a chief revenue officer-not only are they talented at sales and customer engagement, but they would do a decent job writing the business plan for the entire company and also understand our product strategy.” “What separates a C-level exec from, say, a VP or division head is that they need to be a steward of the entire business, not just their group,” says Liu. Liu turned to his investors and talent search firms the Cole Group, Artisanal Talent and Daversa Partners, to find candidates for the four C-suite roles. It wasn’t a priority for me-maybe because we have fewer than 100 employees, and I wasn’t yet feeling the strain.”Īs the company swelled to 300 employees, the strain grew too intense to ignore. “They used a Socratic method to lead me down the right path and were always introducing me to people to show what a great executive looked like,” says Liu. Howie airtable linkedin professional#Looking back, Liu realizes that his investors-which include Benchmark, Thrive Capital, Coatue Management, CRV, and Slow Ventures-had long nudged him to hire more professional managers to take some work off his shoulders. “I went through a personal maturation and realized that pushing myself to exhaustion was not creating maximum impact for the company.” “When you lose the distraction of physically moving from place to place and settle down, you grow more introspective and can figure out what is adding real value,” says Liu. The pandemic forced Liu to stay put and denied him the distractions of the endless string of meetings, the constant travel and a parade of networking functions. In a sick way, I convinced myself that because I was feeling so much pain because it was so hard, that I was doing my job.Ĭovid offered clarity. I was pushing the limits of my physical endurance to try to make it work. Liu says he would spend 14-hour days in the office and often tack on work dinners and grueling business travel. There are only so many hours in the day.” ![]() “But as the company scaled, what I had thought was a strength became a weakness-being involved in everything becomes a liability. It’s a virtue in an early company,” says Liu. I would work on engineering, design and build products, write marketing copy. “I have always thought of myself as a versatile leader. The result: an intimate-and often vulnerable look-at how startups and founders come of age as they reach new phases in their life cycle and build a foundation for bigger things. Luckily, Liu was game to share his strategy, thinking and process. There was also the compelling psychological angle-how does a control freak CEO like Liu give up some control to others and trust newcomers with his baby, and how do current employees react and adjust to a new management team installed at the top? On a tactical level, I was curious about how a fast-growing startup, flush with cash, new hires-and heightened investor expectations-matures into a more organized and professionalized company. The news that Liu was bringing in a new layer of leadership from outside Airtable intrigued me. ![]()
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