How Crystal Knows CEO Drew D'Agostino grew Crystal Knows to $10.5M revenue and 3.3K customers in 2024.

I'm Drew I'm from a company called Crystal so we've got like personality data platform um been around for a little while but uh for this talk I um it's kind of funny how the I guess when you do when you're in a startup slash like kind of bootstrap mindset growing over time how like the just you realize wow I've just interacted with a lot of people at my company um and I reached that point and this talk emerged out of an email that I wrote to a found another founder who was in this position where he's just felt like especially this was kind of during the bull market when it just felt like every software engineer was asking for like a quarter million dollars he's like how am I supposed to do this like I don't have the money to pay the people like I need to figure out how to get them in my company um so this I wrote like a very long email that ultimately turned into like my own little personal note and there's a lot of ideas that emerge so this is just like a talk with a lot of these ideas that have refined implemented over the last like five ish years um I don't even get something out of it so first of all there's like when you're running a company as a founder or as an executive the thing they don't tell you about is just how emotional it is like like he was just saying the talk um it's not gonna ask about like there's three heartbreaks that three types of heartbreaks I can think of so who in the room has lost someone they really wanted to hire and then they chose a different job for another reason all right it's a couple and was that was it ever because of money like better offer yeah it's always like all right um what about someone that unexpectedly quit and you didn't ex you didn't really didn't want them to anybody okay and then and then someone and then someone you had to let go mostly because either you not necessarily strictly because of like performance reasons but basically has anybody had to do layoffs before because they got over their skis okay got it all right so people in the room have felt this pain um I should have asked this how do I what's the uh the button to print yeah got it oh the middle button green yeah I swear I'm a tech guy right all right first first of all I have one of my employees in the room did everyone sign the non-solicit as well just in case no nobody recruit Neil he's making plenty of money okay um no but this talk this talk is uh mostly for people who are trying to pay their pay their people well but have encountered that pain point and um in that pain point I kind of loosely describe as you are operating with far less resources than your better funded competitors therefore you need to give people a reason to come to your company that is not all about the offer not all about the financial package so there's a couple of points in here that I'll kind of get into but largely I kind of stick with this idea that I want employees to stick around my company Dove twice the amount of like the average startup tenure which tends to be around like 1.82 years depending on how you measure it that's my that's my goal of measure of success um so I'm going to go into a couple of these parts share some stories share a couple of like the hard lessons and mistakes that I have learned over the last few years in hopes that maybe you can pull from that and then a couple of the uh specific things that I go to in interviews and policies that I've implemented at Crystal some of which are pretty new some of which have been for a while um that are kind of like I think working because we we have a we have a pretty strong culture now and and I the way I've talked to people about why they work at my company now we can pay people like more much more competitively than we were earlier on so it's not as much of a struggle to like be able to get someone a compelling offer but it's still you know working at a startup is or an early stage company of any kind is a higher risk so you need to package you need to put together something that's compelling to them somebody go into a couple of these strategies so 2023 we're not in 2021 so money is not flowing abundantly we're not in zero interest rate environment where everybody every company can fund themselves so startups all of a sudden became more risky again kind of like they used to they actually carry real career risks because everybody sees oh yeah X company did 20 layoffs and are you a company going to do the same so startups kind of carry in my view carry the risk they should because startups are inherently volatile and that means that I think this problem is going to get more acute as top performers also experience risk aversion and they also are going to look at all right what are my options in these safer environments um so as a founder there's no real alternative to having eight players because you're fighting against inertia you're building something from nothing it is very hard to do that especially when you're trying to grow quicker than would be natural so you just need those kind of top performers and now those top performers are experiencing the same types of you know economic stresses that a company is so they're looking you know just just as starters with just as Founders are looking for ways to be more secure at their future as are these people so I think this is going to become a more acute problems like how do I actually convince these people to join my company knowing that they might have to take a salary cut knowing that they're probably definitely taking more risk with their career um and here's the unfortunate truth something I learned as an introverted software engineer that did not like sales did not like recruiting they're not like all those people oriented parts of my job whether you like it or not you as a Founder are the most effective recruiter for your company we were just we were just talking the other day and this is kind of in business development just reaching out to a prospect or a customer with knowing that you're the founder and found or the CEO or senior executive like that carries weight that you can't get you can't just didn't you can't say nah I'll just pass that off if you're not doing the recruiting and doing founder-led recruiting you're actually I I think really hurting the company um so it's always really surprising when I get on the phone with some like I do a lot of phone screenings just to talk to people and have that first conversation some would say it might be a waste of time but I don't think it's waste time they're always kind of shocked like wait the CEO you're talking to me it's like yeah tell me tell me about this like jazz band you got on your resume here uh yeah um and in that process I think one of the reasons that Founders shy away from those parts of their job is because it is so emotional and I want to say like I already asked a little bit so it seems like some of us have had like the ones that got away in the business sense I'll share a couple of like those from me that are like stick for me so this particular one was a um I was trying to hire a very early on this is 2015. I needed a new engineering leader and this guy I was I had like the hugest developer crush on him he was like the he just had this amazing GitHub he was writing he was right in Nashville where I live we met like three times we're like so on the vision got really far into the process he accepted my offer and then ultimately his old company he sent this email was like Hey you know I was really not in their best spots with that basically they offered me more money and now they've convinced me otherwise and now I can come back that one hurt that one really stung here was one where uh this was a this was a product leader who yeah you can see basically my decision ultimately came from working at a company that was larger and much more well established which medicates some of the risk for myself and my family during these uncertain times I'm like I wish I could say something enough but you're kind of right um really wanted I really wanted that one um you know we'll stay in touch but I haven't talked to him since of course but yeah yeah this was a this was a more recent this was a more recent one um this was this job applicant that we got really far into the process and this is what I wanted to include this one because it's not like this doesn't happen to us now because this is just last month and um I think an Evidence of the the economic climate this is another case and I dug in a little bit more because I talked to him after this is another risk aversion thing you're a small company I had this huge offer from this big company salary was slightly higher I we we're gonna you know I'm gonna go with this so I think it's it's this is gonna come into play more and more that whole risk conversion thing um so every one of these though has a has a lesson like whether that's a one that got away or someone unexpectedly quitting and I've experienced this like multiple of those heartbreaks for like eight years doing my current company but I've also gotten I think better at not just the front end of it the recruiting part of it but building real policies at our company that had that I now share in the interview process and actually really helps...