Of course, in the beginning, you don't have other Pete, so you kind of like you do it yourself. And this is what you should be doing. But, very quickly, when the companies are around 30 to 50 people, fixes should be a goal. Your goal should be that you build a team and framework that will do it for you. Today, NFX's general partner, Gigi Levy-Weiss, is sitting down with Avishai Abrahami, the CEO of Wix.com. Avishai has Wix into a company of about 5000 people with $1,400,000,000 in revenue.
They'll cover how founders can become great CEOs, measurements most startup smith, the difference between good failure and bad failure and much more. Let's jump in. Hi, Avishai. Hey. Thanks for joining us for the podcast today. I was waiting a long time for this, and I'm so happy that you're with us. I don't know if you know, but a few years ago, I wrote a piece and made a video for artifacts, which is called what makes a strong startup CEO. It's one of our top performing essays, I think.
And it basically something that I really focus on, which is what makes a startup founder really good as a CEO, but even more importantly, so what it makes them really good as leaders. And this is exactly why I wanted to talk to you. You know, if you're the founder of weeks, you know, your world class CEO, you know, that's what I think You're super star, super founder, super goals driven. You're great.
From what I can see from the outside in recruiting and supporting and motivating Flint, And so, you know, the success of the company, I think, is very much because of that end of the team that you recruited. I mean, how large is the company today? Like, how many users today? We have 200 and the 30,000,000 users. And all of them are small businesses. Right? No. And we actually have everything. Every mix. Right?
We have a lot of small businesses, but we have also a lot of Pete that went into a project or school project. We have about, probably around a huge amount of students, like, from the United States schools or University of Colleges. And, we are selling to 100 and 92 Countries, which is everywhere possible in the in the planet. And how many and how many languages like other website, like in every possible language? I think we support Pete, if I remember correctly.
And what's the company's revenues or less? About 1,400,000,000 for this year. Oh, that's a nice number. And how many people in the company company is around 5000 people. And how many years ago did you start it? We started at the end of 2006. So I would say 2007. So that's quite a while ago. That's quite a while ago. That's for sure. Yes. It is true. And so founders, everybody listening.
I mean, I think that you guys should really pay attention here because in the next kinda half an hour to an hour. Avisha is gonna help you understand about leadership, which is where I think this company excels. So, you know, one of the topics that we talk about is the difference between being a founder, which is just a practical thing of starting a company.
And then turning this into being a good CEO, which many of the founders have never been before, and then turning this into being a great leader and the personal growth that you need to undergo to be good at all these things. And, you know, as we know, there are many that are good at being a CEO in terms of the manager, managerial skills. There are others that are good at being leaders, not graded. Ding CEOs, and some are good at both.
So can you tell me a little bit about the 1st days co founding Wix? Like, what were you like then? You know, how did you changed some debt point onwards. Well, you're talking about me personally. Yeah. Yeah. You personally. You're not gonna get off the hook. First of all, I think that there's a Founder. I was very lucky that I had 2 strong co founders with me and, give a couple and gig with a genius, my younger brother, which is brilliant. And very early we had Neil Zoil joining.
So team around me was phenomenal. And and I think that is probably my biggest trick. If you ask me, what is the best trick that one trigger can say and teach or explain is get phenomenal talent for the journey with you. I'm always saying that, my biggest Kiel, the founder and CEO, is that I grew up in a family where I'm the least intelligent person in the house. And because both my brothers are brilliant and my parents are, and I'm the older kid, so to feel comfortable.
And, of course, you know, so I learned to manage people smarter than me because that's what the older kid does. Right? He's managing his young brothers and his parents. And, so for me to feel at home, I need to be so honored that people are the smart enemy. And I think that gave me huge advantage over most founders that I know. Because a lot of people try to create environments where they are the smartest person in the room. And for me, it just feels natural.
So for me to feel uncomfortable, I need to be surrounding other people that I smarter than it. I mean, that's the number one thing I can say. The biggest difference, right, is if you think about what is the biggest difference between the founder to see So the founder, you have an idea. Right? And, of course, you start a company. Everybody can do that.
What makes a good founder is that he can create a clear vision, execute on the vision, hire really good people and deliver the product, work on the marketing campaigns, human, his founding team, and get to a point when a company start a good CEO, to transition to BCO, you don't do those things anymore yourself. You need to build a mechanism to hire good people. You need to build a mechanism and a team that will do the marketing. You need to build a mechanism to do the product.
You need to build a mechanism. Okay, to do the engineering. And when I talk about a mechanism, part of it, of course, is is human factor, right, when you need to have really good engineers The other thing is that you need to have a mechanism is also how you measure when it's doing things well. Right? So you need to have something that is visible to say, well, we're doing things well. We're progressing.
And then the next part is, of course, that it's always clear why and how we're trying to achieve something. So I think when I started, I think a lot of the things were not so clear to me that this is my number one goal is to build mechanisms that will do that and not do it myself. Of course, in the beginning, you don't have other Pete, so you kinda like you do it yourself. And this is what you should be doing. But very quickly, many companies around 30 to 50 Pete, This should be a goal.
Your goal should be that you build a team and framework that will do it for you.
I love that because this is very much like concept that I like writing about and talking about, which is that I always say that the role of the and there's a manager is to basically create the strategy, which is the vector in which you need to run, then to put the team in place, which is the people that are supposed to carry the company in that vector, then create a set of KPIs that are the measurements to make sure that you're in the right direction and then basically take a step backwards.
Let team go in this direction and measure it. And then in a cycle, go back after, you know, used to be maybe an old company used to be every year, and now it's in a startup. It's like every week and ask yourself, are we running in the right direction? Do we have the right team to take us there? And how are we measuring the right things? And then if you don't have the right strategy, shift it a little bit. If you don't the right team fix it.
And if you're measuring the wrong things, fix the KPIs, and then just continue on and on and on. Flint what I hear from you is that you're basically saying it same where it is basically building the mechanism, which is a set of methodology process and KPIs and getting the best people to do that and just repeating this again and again and Did I get it right? Yeah. You did. I did notice that companies have a bit of variety on what are the mechanisms to use and how to build them.
But if you look at the better companies, it a variety is not so big. Essentially end up being very similar. And not on the on the least on the principle, then you covered a lot of them. When you said, measure, make it visible. Make sure that you have the great people. And, of course, those are the output is the outputs of of that process of the mechanism. But the mechanism themselves, I think, are also very similar. So I'll be a lot about how to do the meetings, how to run project.
And, I mean, those are essentially what make the mechanisms. Right? And, like, what I noticed is that if you look at great teams, Those are very similar. So could you give, like, a few examples of the unique mechanisms you have in weeks? Like, the few thing that you put in place that you think we're core to the management methodology that made weeks what it is and allowed you later on to scale because these mechanisms were in place so that everybody could use them.
Yeah. Let me start with the principle. Okay? So we put the principle very early, which is, if you can't measure it, it didn't happen. Okay? We measure everything and it cannot measure it. It didn't happen. So this is a very clear one saying you can't take pride on something that is unmeasured. Okay? If you did something, I think it's gonna imply support that it didn't, well, it's worth nothing. Right? You cannot measure it. If you do marketing and can measure an improvement, it's worth nothing.
Okay? Don't mention it because it didn't happen from our perspective. But, anyway, and it's fine. Right? It's fine to do things, and we found that they didn't do the effect that we want we actually also measured the amount of James you tried something, right, which is a positive thing because not everything you're gonna do. So we added another principle which says allow failure. This is going the top principle, but when you take it into a deeper one level, it become more interesting.
So for example, let's look at the chart and hiring. Okay? How do you build a mechanism around that? So a mechanism around that, the one we ended up with is that we test everybody. Well, there's one exception. If people work with a person before somebody we trust, work with somebody before, we know who he is, but we test everybody. So if you're coming to Wix and you wanna be an engineer, we're gonna test you what everybody's doing that.
But if you're coming to weeks and you wanna work for HR, we're gonna also test you. And because that's a principle that we agreed on that that mechanism of hiring, had to come up with a test that ended up saying, well, what's the most important thing for HR? The most important for HR is that they're bringing the right talent. So we test everybody in a job by letting them interview people that already work at Wix that we know.
So then we will see how well they evaluate somebody on a base Morgan interview and compare it to what we know on that person. Mhmm. By doing that, we've created a test that allows us to know how good somebody is. From that point, then when we do hiring, we also measure the quality of the people we hired. Right?
And as a result from that, we can always tune the HR processes and get a better and better mechanism right, and better talent in a jar, which, of course, influenced the talent in all of the company. And so this kind of thinking, I think, is very Morgan, and this is something that takes quite a while. Pete me jump in a few of these because I find them super interesting.
I think when I love the concept of testing everybody that joins the company, I think that there's not as a company too small to actually do that. And many times I get pushback from founders who either fear that good candidates are not gonna want to, take a test because they're just coming to work in a small startup or others that are saying that they wouldn't know how to test each one of these roles because, you know, they're either techies or their product Pete.
What would you say to a young founder that says maybe I should start with testing only when we're, like, few hundred people? Because I like you think that you should start super early. That is an idiot. I'm not joking. Right? We are the first child who's at that test. Okay? And she was a super senior, way more senior than our company in that stage needed. And it says a lot about the person that she was, like, willing to go for this process. Okay? It says about a lot about hair. Right?
That she was willing to participate in that. And engineers, there's no other way to hire engineers. Now you cannot talk about software. That's complete rubbish. And when it comes to design, obviously, you do it. When it comes to financials, let somebody build a Morgan, and then, you know, so I think that's completely wrong. What I personally like other than coding where there was a practical test that you actually take as a test.
What I personally like is giving people kind of missions to do and then come back and present them. Is this what you guys like as well? Well, yeah, it's something right in the HR. What we did is that we actually Pete her interview, and then we asked care after that about the people that, you know, we did it for a few HR candidates, and we just compare what they told us to what we knew about the people they interviewed. Right?
So that was a task, but in the office, right, that interviewed over 2 hours. Let's jump for a second into hiring, which, you know, I think, you, as you said before, surrounding yourself with people smarter and better than you is the key. How do you think about hiring and the startup in the early stage and hiring Pete talent? And we spoke about testing them, but, like, what processes do you think could be in place? Like, how many interviews? Who should interview a person?
And kind of what percent of your time do you think you should spend as a young founder on hiring, kind of dedicating to finding the best Pete. Until you have direct to them, I'm gonna say that. Right? Because even as a startup, you have an objective. You know, only one in people in the company. Well, you should spend all the time needed until you have fifteen people that are the right people. Right? So it can be a lot of time, and then at some point, it could be very little time.
When it comes to hiring, I'll give you an example. I cycled for 22 people before I found the Omer Scheima CMO. So I hired. I moved people to different things. I fired Pete. I think it was around 22 people that they hired within about a year in something, right, year and a half. And some of them I hired as juniors and hope that they're gonna be or, like, I didn't give them any official title to everybody in that team. So I was looking at who's gonna be the best.
And then when I got to Omer after a few weeks, I was obvious that he's on a different level. And this is another part of a very me. It's a very important lesson that I learned in my life is that it's very hard to know who's a super talent on the interview even on the test. You can suspect who's a super talent, but you are not you're not gonna be sure about it, but a month or 2 after, it's very easy to know. And in the beginning of a startup, it's so important to have super Flint.
So you should allow us of the room to make mistakes and replace so this is another very important thing. I wanna tell you another funny story about Omer. I'm just, so after I hired Omer, and my next guy that I wanted to hire, was for me that now is the CEO of IronSource. It was before IronSource and now. So we're talking and he said, you know, yeah. Might be interested. And then he asked me to talk to Omer after an hour a half that he was talking to Omer came out and said, listen.
He's way better than me. Don't hire me. Keep him. It's a nice story. But this is another thing. Right? But there's only one guy. I think that Tom is a legend. Right? But, anyway, that time, he was unemployed and needed a job. Right? It's not like he was I found it to be super impressive, and I was thinking with him about whatever They can do next in weeks and then, of course, started, the iron source and and build this incredible company.
But I really believe that when you hire people, you should it's a startup, leadership cycle for people if they're not the talent that you need, if they're not a super talent. But in the startup, there's another thing. Right? You cannot really always hire the base people because you don't have the money. You don't have the time. Sometimes you have to understand that you need to Beller for some roles and then replace them when you have you do have direct talent coming.
And what do you believe about kinda, you when you recruit somebody in, they're kinda okay after a few weeks or a month. Are you one of those people that believes in giving people, you know, a few more months to improve, or do you think that you should fix mistakes really quickly? I think you should fix mistakes most of the time quickly. Not all the time. It depends. Right? I'm just gonna tell my last this is like that.
A players hire a players, a plus players, a plus players, and b players, RSE players. So if you want the organization to You cannot keep somebody and make him into a manager as a Pete. Okay? You'll find that your organization goes and simply hire key players and deep players are F players. Right? And so if you're not on top of that and you don't keep super talents to be the majority of the managers in the team, you will end up with a really bad organization. I love that.
And it's also one of my favorite things. I also love the what you said about, you know, when you're not sure that you have the right person for top top job getting people if you can to actually come and work without the title and then keep yourself the optionality to see who performs and give them that role. This is something that I didn't rehear many people say. I've done this many times before, and it works really well. Clearly, harder to do, but when it works, it works so well.
This is something that I give nobody a title in the beginning. And by the way, today at weeks, you can choose your own title. So choose whatever title you want. We're gonna say it's true. What does that mean? It means that we're not negotiating with you and watch your title. I and you can take whatever title he wants. We don't care. It doesn't change your role. It doesn't change what you do. Not gonna change your salary. K?
But if it's really important for you, what is written on your LinkedIn, feel free to buy whatever you want. We don't care. I like that. And it calculates Flint situation where somebody will, from a child will negotiate with the candidate and then one child and then fight with them and they argue about them. And then I said, well, you know what? We're gonna allow you to do that.
If your signs, if the guy signed, come to the orientation day in weeks, and the first thing they see is that where you could choose whatever title you want. We don't And do you think that over the years, what has changed in the way you're thinking about the kind of talent that you want? I mean, did you need more penurial people earlier on. And then as the company grow, you move to different type of people, do you still look for the same kind of people? How did that change over the years?
Why it depends? It depends on the cycles growth of the company where it's growing. So for example, we're now starting a new business, which is in in the enterprise. Business. We're seeing a lot of larger companies using Wix to build their website. Right? And it's suddenly, you know, it's not a small business, a big company, requires different things, a lot of enterprise thinking, right, and we don't have that. So we need to hire people with experience there. Right?
And extending into that is sounding the Currier to hire people that really know a lot of the things. And a lot of the regular things we do like, in marketing and product. I prefer people with less experience and a lot of talent because we can teach them how we do things. And on that, we have to unlearn them, make them forget about Currier already work and then try to teach them new thing, how we work. Right? Obviously, it's sometime through something.
No. I think developers different because it takes a lot of time to be a really good developer. And then moving from one environment to another is relatively easy most of the time. It really depends what is the area. And one is the if it's a new thing, if it's a thing that exists in already a really good way of doing that, then you wanna hire public people that you can teach your way and not that you have to unlearn something. So it really depends. There's no rule.
In a startup, you know, the best thing, of course, is to hire a very experienced CMO from a very successful company an amazing CTO that is used to manage a thousand people and likes coding himself. So he needs very hands on on the code. And a HR that knows how to build Morgan organization of a thousand Pete. And if you if you can do that when your startup is starting, that's incredible. But I never met anybody who did that at that level. Right?
So the fear in that is practical here are very different. And you have to understand that you're probably gonna people that are not all of them gonna grow to the next level. Right? And that's fine. And so it's so much easier, I think, to hire somebody and say, well, you're helping me manage this. There's no city tile here. And then when you actually get to a place where it's a hundred people need somebody who knows how to put in a child organization. Right?
You can bring one without demoting them. Yeah. Definitely not always trivial. And I think you guys did a great job. Talk about measuring everything. And, again, many founders that talk to end up being really decent or good at measuring the core business KPIs because that's kinda what everybody told them over the years. So, you know, you have you know, you have conversion, you have retention, you have everything.
But then when it came to measuring things that were what they felt our support task to the company. They were really bad at putting KPIs to that. Is Wix measuring everything on every front? We are trying. I gotta say, not as much as I want. Right? But, definitely more than others. This is the first thing I wanna say. Most startups that I meet and most companies, they measure even on the business measure a lot less than they should. Okay?
And so they come with conversion, and it's usually percentage based conversion, which is not relevant. You always have to measure conversion on dollars Then they measure a few things on sales efficiency, then they measure a few things on other things, and they have, like, 5. K? You cannot understand your business from 5 parameters. There's no way to do that there. And if you only focus on 5, somebody wants to, I don't know if it's true that Facebook used to measure just interactions.
Or if you just measure interaction, just gonna make product that add buttons that nobody needs. Right? It's gonna add so much more interactions. I don't think it's true. Again, I have no idea. I've never worked at Facebook, but I just wanna show something that is so silly. Okay?
And the thing that a lot of the companies I see do that, we actually generate pretty much from the 1st days, I would say, probably about 20 pages of things that we look in graphs on the business side, which very quickly grew to more than that. But this enabled us to understand really why I think that the details that actually change in the business, okay, and where we wanna influence something.
When we see a drop, when we see improvement, where we don't understand something, Not creating that visibility early on is gonna be something that we leave you with so much that you don't understand about what drives your business. And I know there's ton of book about it like, oh, should you measure 5? Should you measure free? You should measure this is your no start. I Beller seen a company that actually has found those 5 magical things.
So my opinion on that is that you do it and then you're missing the action picture of what's happening in your business. And so early on in the weekdays, like, how many things do you think you actually tracked to understand what the business is? I mean, I think about some of the company that I ran and you know, I used to spend it was definitely, I don't know, 15 to 20 minutes every Morgan, understanding all the, you know, like, looking at everything.
Making sure that I understand what's really happening in the business by looking at a bunch of things. How many, you know, early on in the business? How many things? How many data points did were you guys looking at to know where you are and to take smart decisions? Well, let let's look at that.
Okay. So the first thing is, of course, where people come from, so what countries, okay, what keywords then the conversion on the landing pages, k, then the ads that worked, then conversion from each one of them to their product, then what people tried to do, so what they told us was selected they're trying to do on Wix. Then what they actually did, then what they used in order to try and do that? What is the correlation of success on that? What kind of template to choose?
Okay. When did they churn? What did they buy? Why would the support things they ask for? Oh, and, of course, the quality. The so this was a how pretty it was. For us, it was very important. It still is. The content that they made and the how much they completed on the website in each interaction. So those are the basics one we measure for our business. But it's allowing me to understand, well, we need more templates. So we need different ones.
So we have an issue with that thing and on that thing. Okay? And that is true for every company. There's always those things because you wanna understand your customers. You need to follow on the customer. Right? Your George's conversion is an output from this huge amount of thing that happening on your product. Right? There's so much that's happening.
And if you don't look at the whole picture, you don't understand the whole funnel and then how to use the product, You don't understand what is happening with the customers. At the end of the day, we all work for the customer. We don't work for ourselves to make money. We work for the customer hoping that one day we'll have enough value that we can actually earn money from that, and then we can scale it.
Yep. And so one of the things that I found out that measuring everything gets you to is clearly a good problem, which is transparency and everybody seeing what's happening in the business. But that kind of forces you to be able to accept failure in a much more meaningful way than companies that where there's no transparency and people don't know that things don't work. How do you think about accepting failures in this, you know, in the younger company?
And how do you deal with it in weeks today where, you know, the larger the company becomes, the easier it is to fall into the trap of There's a performance review and failures is what gets you to get a lower performance. And so, you know, what we know is that in huge companies, one of the reasons there's no innovation is because people are afraid to fail because your best routes to getting promoted is not failing and just staying on track.
And we don't want that and start up and definitely not in weeks. So how do you deal with allowing people to feel if it's the right kind of failure and not being afraid this is gonna be negative. I'm gonna distinguish, first of all, to make a clear distinction. There's a big difference between I failed because I did it well. I need the assumption that I was wrong. It didn't work. Yep. And there is another kind of Beller which is I did it badly, and it didn't work. Okay?
And it's not the same because of the first one, I'm happy. And the second one, I don't want you to continue to work at Wix. Okay. Well, obviously, not always, but this is the principle. I think that we want people to do very things very Beller, and then it might fail. There's a few things that you wanna do. Like, I would, a lot of time, mention that project will my decision.
I wanted it and it failed even if it's not always true, because at the end of the day, I think about it is that the team recommended. I approved it. Okay? So from that point and on, it's my responsibility if it fails or succeed. Okay? Mostly if it's failed, if it succeeded, it doesn't have to be my responsibility. But then if if a team will come and say, well, we did it, it doesn't work a lot come out. It doesn't walk through what they did. I would always be the first guy to say, no. No.
No. The is my project. I approved it. I wanted it. And now I think it's to be part of the language of the company. The next thing is, we don't work on checking if everything you did. There's, like, no Four room in which we look at everything somebody did. And we go, well, he did it. He didn't work. You did this. He did work. He did this. It doesn't work. All those tests happen in the background, right, food Morgan.
As part of the day to day activity, okay, which means that you don't go around and Beller. I succeeded or I failed. Okay? And experiment didn't work. You just turn it off and move to the next So by doing that, I think we've created much more freedom for people to fail to test and find that it's not working. I think this is Oh, critical. Then I also love your distinction. I used to when I ran companies, I used to distinguish between what I called good failures and bad failures.
Good failures are the ones where you basically did everything right and the assumption was wrong, or the thing you wanted to test is just, you know, proved to be wrong, and that's great because we now know not to do it. And that's ours because you didn't work well or didn't test as well or, you know, put out a product that's buggy or something. Let's jump for second to meetings.
I mean, you know, one of the tougher things as companies grow is the number of meetings and the amount of wasted time on meetings that are there just because they're there. I know that this is something that you care about. How do you guys deal with that? How did you make sure that in growing the company, the company didn't become a bureaucratic, you know, meeting creator? And what do you recommend founders in that regard early on.
Well, first of all, I gotta say, I think we have too many meetings, right, just to be clear. And I think that we might be better than other companies, a lot of other companies, but we are definitely not where I think we should be. I mean, that people most people should have maybe a meeting a day.
And so I think that, the only people that have more meetings should be management and especially senior management because they actually do nothing else except meetings, right, at the job, but I think that most people should have very little. And and we're not there So I found that we did a few things. 1, we broke the company in what we call sub companies, and each one of those has come like. So each one of those is what we call a CEO of that team and that guy is a chairman.
The chairman is always for my management team. Okay? And this is what's very important. What we found out is that people are always waiting and trying to convince meetings So it will always go up and down, up and down, up and down, and people will wait for things and to approval. And we made a rule that says, well, that this deal of a team and the chairman can pretty much Pete make any decision they want.
And which said essentially, now if somebody wanna make a decision, it can make the decision with one person. Right? And because that person is for my management team, I trust him. I know that he knows most of the time places Beller as I do what we wanna achieve. And so this did a magical thing for decision making because I think the worst thing is not just meaning. It means that you don't get a decision in. Right?
So you have another meeting and not a meeting and not a meeting, and things get delayed and delayed and delayed. So that was a, I think, very important thing. We'll define a clear way to make decision based on the person that is managing the team Wix E Commerce managed by Eric, him and his chairman, his daddy, they can just talk to each other and make a decision on almost everything. And that did a dramatic effect. When you start a startup, of course, you don't have to think about those things.
Right? You do need to think about something else and we're gonna talk about it in a minute. But because you are there, right, you have thirty Pete, you talk to each one of them every day. But if you are in a meeting and it's not an updated meeting, let's say, I mean, but I'm in the happening day, and there's, like, no action items coming from that meeting, written. It was a waste of time. So this is another rule that we have, and I think it's working pretty well. Right?
A meeting has to have a clear why we are here and a clear what's happening after, and every project has to have a single owner. There's one guy that owned that project. And just a question on that. Do you have, like, rules on what you need to send before the meeting so that the meeting can happen? Yes. But, you know, it's a company full of Israelis and Eastern European, you know, we can have many roles. It works less good than those mechanism I described before.
Yeah. The next part is how you do the project management. Okay? And this is an interesting thing. Most project management usually would have you have a product guy. He writes specs, then you have another guy that would work a technical team and able to sprint or whatever. Right? And we found that it's way better to say, well, the owner of project. The name is the product part is the developer, and he actually come to the product guy for clarification.
And on the other way around, and that made a massive reduction in meetings because now a lot of the engineers are not depending on talking to anybody in order to do what they want. If they think the understanding, they'll do it. Right? And we kinda, like, made this framework where they present it Beller week. You show what it did to the team.
So now the team meeting is about showing what it did which is great for many different reasons, but the more interesting part I think here is that because the engineer owned the feature, not the product guy owned the feature, and then Jenny can get decision and make decision on that. He doesn't have to escalate retro big meetings, which so that was not a massive thing that we did. It takes a lot. You have to be really brave to do it.
It's very different than how people today are working in most places. Yep. And what tools are you using for this project management in house? Well, we use Monday.com, of course. Of course. I don't think that everybody knows, but clearly Monday started as a week So let's jump for a second to leadership.
And I'm gonna start by throwing in a statement that I want you to tell me whether you think it's right or wrong, but the statement is that being a good manager and being a good leader is not necessarily the same thing. And that the the problem with being a startup founder is that you need to be both. I have no idea. Don't know what's a good manager, and I'm not sure I know what's a good leader. Tell you how I think about it. Right?
If I look on the planet today, I I would rate a loan master leader and CEO at the team. K? And I know now people like him. Don't like him. But in reality, I I, like, look at what he does in managing so many companies, I don't even know how to compare, but I cannot do what he does in so many companies at the same time. I cannot do it in one company. K? Is he a leader or the manager? That's a good question. I think he is a good example of both. Right? I think that he's clearly leading the Pete.
You know, there's different definitions of leadership. The one that I like the most is the one that says that a leader takes people to where they should be, but they don't necessarily wanna go to. Right? It's the ability to get people to get out of their comfort zone and not necessarily do the trivial stuff but go and do the things that they should do or the places where they should be where without the leader, they wouldn't go.
And I think in that regard, you know, clearly, What does the manager do? Well, manager does a lot of the thing that we spoke about before that are good processes in determining strategy and the recruiting of the right team and setting up the KPIs, and there could be a great manager. And I think we've seen people that are great managers that, you know, there weren't great leaders, which made it tough for them to get people to give more and work harder and be more committed.
And then there could be great leaders who aren't necessarily great manager Alright. So you're talking about white collar operations. So somebody is very good at defining everything and making sure that people follow the guidelines we discuss. And another one that is actually making them exciting and understanding and taking them to the goal. Yes. So I would argue that the second one cannot do it without being very, very detailed on what he wants to achieve.
You cannot inspire people but giving a talk. It only works in the movie. Right? In reality, you wanna talk about how to make a project management or you wanna build a site or you wanna do a CRM? It's the one who leads that part of that product or whatever. You need to be so excited about the details. Right? You wanna tell a built in Electrify. You need to know the details to lead people into that because they're gonna see that you're excited about what they do, which is the details.
And so you need to essentially manage the details, right, of the product that you're creating and the customer interaction of all those things. So I think that both are very important. I think you cannot be a leader without knowing a huge amount of the details of why you're doing that and working with the team On actually achieving it. On the details.
Yeah. I think one of the big things in leading people is making sure that they know that they really understand the company's story and strategy and where it's going. And this is becoming tougher and tougher as the company grows. Like, at the beginning, you're, like, whatever, fifteen Pete. You know, they just tier you all day long, and they know exactly where you want the company to go. They know exactly what's your strategy.
And then it it becomes bigger and bigger, start having town halls and you record yourself as stuff. How do you make sure that everybody in the company kinda knows what's, you know, where the company's heading, what's the strategy, and how does that change over the years? Well, to be fair, honestly, it's kinda like well, in the beginning, you said, everybody knows. Right? Until a 100 and, I don't know, 50 to 200 people, everybody knows what is happening.
Yep. And the reason everybody knows what's happening is because you just talk to people or talk to people that directly talk to adequate. Right? And so that's super easy. And most of the time, when you start and you build a startup, the story stays pretty much the same. Right? In the 1st few years, unless you do kind of a pivot, but then everybody knows if you did a pivot, the stories stay pretty much fixed. You're just doing the same story better and better.
When you grow, you need to start creating communications. So you build all the things. As you said, company meetings, presentations, you talk to senior management, you talk to their management, you do often, whatever, all hand meetings, whatever kind of meeting you want, and and all those things. But from my experience, I noticed that it matters somewhat. Right? Essentially, as long as the company continue to do what it did before and you don't wanna change anything essential, it's very easy.
And second that you wanna do something in a different way or change a lot of what the way that the company thinks about something, it doesn't matter how many company meetings you're gonna do, how much It's gonna be very hard for people to actually believe that the company is actually changing something. And I think Microsoft demonstrated that we declined, right, Yep.
Until that they were talking about the cloud and the cloud, and nobody was kinda like nobody, Microsoft actually used their own cloud. And then one day, Satya came and said, well, you have 3 months to work everything to the cloud. And then it actually happened. So a big part, I think, of how you tell a story when you would do a change is to make one of the statements. On basis with API first approach, right, in in Amazon, you have to be very clear where we're not discussing that anymore.
This is how we do it. So when a company is very small, you can create in a conversation. Company is very big. You kinda have to be a bit more blunt about it. But I think to to get the message in a bigger company, when something changes, Right? You have to be very, very clear about, well, this is not the presentation. This is our discussion.
This is what's gonna happen from now And, of course, you can do it in a nicer ways and or in a, like, business way, which I think was a either you build it API first or you go home. Yep. Right. And when you do something, right, and it's a bigger company, then you have to ask yourself, well, is this something that will continue what we did before? This is something new. If it's something new, you have to be very, very wonderful, and make sure that everybody hear that message.
How do you think about transparency in the company? I mean, one of the things in call in a company and being able to be a great leader is and I'm talking about before becoming a public company where you have restrictions or what you can and can't say sometimes, but how do you balance the needs to basically communicate and be transparent and give everybody the feeling that they're in the know.
And then on the flip side, not share, you know, not telling them that when things are not going well and so on because they are, you know, many James, they're gonna get afraid. They're gonna be looking for a job. They're gonna think that the company's not doing well. Do you balance that over the years? Well, I think that, 1st of all, why? I think that's the most important part of why. And, I mean, if you're starting to build a company and you're making sure you bring great talent. Okay?
Then if you give that talent, all the information that is they need, the result will be that great things will happen, even without you do anything. Doing anything to do to cause it, right, because you have great talent that has the information they need. And and so my belief is that sharing information as much as you can. And that would mean that I would have strings that show all the sales, all the KPIs, what users did, what users didn't do, all the issues it support. I would have screens.
I would send reports to the level that people would just always come back and tell me this is too much. We need to reduce it. And I would like, no. No. No. Don't read it. I don't mind, but I want it to be available all the time. So I was pushing it in a very aggressive way. And I mean, that created a phenomenal return because a lot of really smart people know these things that, or can we date years that wouldn't happen without that information.
So I just kept pushing it in every medium I had company meetings, team meetings, screens around the office, emails, weekly emails, monthly emails every possible way. When you're a public company, of course, there's something that you wanna share. You you can no longer share, and that's very sad. That's very tough. How do you think about keeping your company fast? I mean, I know that you are really fast per person, and you care about speed. And as companies grow, they James slower.
What are the methodologies that you have in place to keep everybody around you fast? Well, so from what I noticed is that, essentially, there are a few reasons Beller, that actually took kind of reason that things are getting slower. So the first one is lack of urgency, and lack of urgency means that if you work at Microsoft, you don't feel that Microsoft would be effective, but what do you do? Right? It's like it doesn't really matter.
Well, it might matter to you, to your career, to what your boss is saying, but it's not gonna influence the bottom line of Microsoft. Right? So the way I think about it is that you need to connect people to the customers because when they're connected to the customers, you know, that it does matter for the customer using their product. Do you wanna connect people to the customers? I think this is super important to create motivation.
It's also important to create understanding and expertise on why you're doing things and how to do them once a customer experience. I think this is the first part, and I think that's essential. The second part is things slow down a lot of the time because of complex decision making. Which is not your who's the owner, and we try to make that everything as a clear owner.
Long decision making, as I said, well, you need approval from this guy to get from that guy, so we need an approval from that guy. And we eliminated that by creating the sub company's structure. We have the chairman and the CEO that can come to every decision. Then a lack of resources, and lack of resources, I wanna be clear, it's not lack of engineers, right, or lack of whatever. It's kinda like because it's the fact that you need UX. You need a product guy. You need to try the content.
And if you are waiting in line to get those things, obviously, you are slower. K? So you need to make those either really available, or what we did is that we just gave every large team to own resources. So there's no team in Wix that actually depend on somebody else to get those resources. So that was very important. And I think those are the things that we identified that create a dramatic effect in velocity.
Till other layers for that, right, it's how you write the code that makes a big difference. For example, when you build one service, your company start, your company has 3 or 4 services. And when you have 3 or 4 services, well, you can just write every service from scratch, and it's okay. But when you grow and you have a 1000, then all those blocks that give you advice on how to write 1 or 2 services are no longer relevant. Because it's a very different problem managing a 1000 live services.
Right? It's very different than 2. So this is something that you have to to keep consideration. If you are really good technically, I think you should do it from day 1, but if not, you're gonna have to find that you have to do refactoring or what. So that's another important thing. Getting very clear product and project management methodologies. I think it's also very important for a velocity. So those are the things I wanna say here something else, Gigi, if I may, which is not exactly that.
Right? Not exactly direct answer to your question, but I also need a lot of time from founders. And I think that takes startups, right, or companies have only two situations. The first one is that they don't have enough resources for all the things. It's obvious they need to do. And the second one is really a disaster for the company where they have enough resources, but not enough things to do with them that will drive value. K?
So I always remind that my teams is that as long as you have too many things you wanna do and not enough resources when in good place. You're in a good position. Let's jump to a bunch of practical questions. So Back to the office, remote, or hybrid, we still get these questions from our founders, you know, motor companies, larger companies. What's your view on that? Like, how do you keep the company efficient? Do you allow people to work from home?
What would you recommend the small start up to do? So I'm gonna say, 1st of all, let's start up working from home is suicidal. Okay? That's my opinion on that. This is how the culture of the company gonna be created. The language of the company will be created. Everything that will create the company going forward is credit in those early days, it cannot happen if you do it from home. Right? So I mean, for a small startup I agree. 100%. Work every day from the office.
Well, it's very hard for me. Right? I I heard many opinions back. I said I just saw a few companies share with me some information. And they look at ways to measure what people actually do when they work at home. So, apparently, and it depends which country and what is, but apparently, the last day of the week and the 1st day of the week has become vacation days. Mostly the last day of the week.
If you have an event Thursday, if the United States is Friday, So the actual amount of productivity that happened on that day goes down by 70% approximately from what I've seen. And on the 1st day of the week, it also targets around 60%. And then during the free middle day of the week, it actually goes up, but mostly because those companies require people to arrive 3 days a week to work.
So I think that maybe when everybody was working for a moment, it was obvious that you have meetings all the time, and it was okay. But I don't believe that it's a We didn't take test that yet at week. So I don't know what to tell you, but I think that, obviously, it's not as good as working from, the office. And till what stage, like, from your experience would you recommend insisting on everybody arriving to the office?
Like, thirty people, hundred people, I mean, clearly a very generic question, but can I give people a pointer? Well, that went wrong. I would say it's 0 to a 100, everybody in the office, for sure. And then for my 100, you might be saying that if you believe that they're actually working the same level, maybe that's something you can do. But I gotta say again, I'm finding myself living in that lesson. I think that it's just not true. And, again, I just saw some data about it.
I think that people just don't work as my phone home. It's very, very hard to force yourself to do it. I agree completely. I also think that there was a period of time in COVID when people didn't go out where the initial analysis shows very high productivity because people literally had nothing else to do. They finished all of Netflix, and so they were home and they were working.
But now I think that, as you said, especially the 1st and last day of the week, but also just in general, it's very difficult to give the same level of focus. And so, you know, we are for early stage startup, we're strongly recommending being as much as possible together.
We think that what I also read a lot of research about is around fact that it's easier to do repetitive mundane tasks from remote, but when you need to work on innovation, when you need to work on new features when you need to work on something that's actually a change from the norm that reduces the ability to deliver dramatically. By the way, to this minute, to this podcast, right, I just came for a meeting.
We worked on some feature, and there was this, the the sales engineer and was describing something. And I was in that meeting. It was a few other Pete. I would just say the brainstorming on the whiteboard. Yep. Okay. And we came on with a super simple solution for that. Alright. That will probably save us months of development. There is no chance Beller that this kind of a discussion would happen over a video chat.
It's just impossible because the interaction, there was somebody who went to the port. Somebody said, somebody came, somebody had some somebody else on-site, you know, all of that James credit, okay, this brainstorming session that he cannot do in me. I Beller seen that happening in a bit Beller. Vichai, if you wanted to recommend one book or movie or podcast or something to founders that are looking to get Beller, What would that be? Alright. So I'm gonna tell you my favorite. Alright?
And, it's kind of an amusing one. Alright. So it's called the replacements. It's a movie with Keanu Reeves as a quarterback in an NFL team that is going on a strike and they bring this team of replacements to play instead of the team. Right? And I think this is the Beller book or anything I've seen on team building. Right? And so that's my favorite one. It shows that can find somebody who's really good at one thing. They have to compensate on it for another guy with other people.
It shows what his team spirit, how it's Beller, It shows that normally when bringing a team in the beginning, they'll fight, and then you have to find a way to actually focus them around something. It shows so much. It funny movie. And I think for me, it's the best ever educational thing I've seen about team building. Oh, I have to admit that I didn't see it, and I'm gonna watch it this weekend. Now I have something that I got out of it. I gotta say it's also very silly.
So Beller, you know me, you know, that silly doesn't scare me. Oh, the other way around. Just gonna say, you know, one of the thing that this is, from that movie, but there's another thing. So one of the thing I learned in my wife and echo from my head from that movie is that winners always want the ball when the game is on the line. Okay? Again, it's a Pete movie. Right? Yep. Obviously, that fits there. I know that if I have a project k?
That is something that can move the needle a lot on the business side. All the winners in the company will fight about who gets the ball. Interesting. Alright? Yep. And who gets to do it? K? And immediately, I know that this is gonna happen, and this is also a way that I know who's actually a winner. And you can see that once you embrace that principle, I think it's super important. Beller, I think that's an amazing closing Pete. Avishai, thank you so much for sharing your experience with us.
I think there's tons of girls of wisdom here that founders will be smart to take. And thanks so much, and looking forward to next time. My pleasure. Excellent. Thanks.