Chapters
0:00 Welcome Robert Hatta
2:00 Right place, right time – Welcome to the boom in Silicon Valley!
5:16 Onward to London and Netflix, Virgin Mobile, and Apple iTunes
8:55 Making intentional career decisions
11:22 Welcome back to Cleveland and Jumpstart
16:21 Robert’s nonlinear career path in review
20:04 What is Ten-X Talent and what is it’s mission?
22:56 Advice for College Students entering the workforce
29:43 Advice for experience talent, the three (3) keys to start-up success

Each week, we interview proven leaders from our network, to learn from their experiences, and share their Talent Attraction and Candidate Experience stories with you.

• Our mission is to promote the accomplishments of our guests
• Highlight the companies where they work and the services, and products that they offer
• Share success stories from their experiences and, most importantly
• Provide strategies for job seekers and advice to talent seeking to accelerate their careers.
  

Today’s guest is Robert Hatta Founder of Ten-X Talent. His career roles have included, but are not limited to product marketing at Virgin Mobile. Growth marketing at Netflix in the UK, leading retail marketing for iTunes at Apple in Europe, all before returning to the U S and playing key roles at both Jumpstart in Cleveland and the Drive Capital in Columbus, Ohio, where he served as Chief Talent Officer for a little over nine years. In our chat, Robert shared several great points of advice including:

• The top three characteristics he looks for in recruiting start-up talent: Intentionality, Adaptability, and Consistency
• His experiences with both serendipity and intentionality over his career journey
• Embracing the nonlinear career path and the value it can bring to you and those you advise
• The mission behind his new venture Ten-X Talent

Navigating the Unpredictable: Robert Hatta’s Journey through Tech, Talent, and Intentional Career Choices

[00:00:04] Ron Laneve: Hello and welcome to Episode 25 of the Bell Falls Search Focus on Talent Podcast. I met today’s guest several years ago and with my career in recruiting, I can’t tell you how much respect I have for him and everything he’s achieved in the talent arena. He’s one of the top talent people in our region, if not the entire country.

[00:00:25] Ron Laneve: He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and after high school decided to go west and pursued his undergraduate degree from Stanford University. His career roles have included, but are not limited to product marketing at Virgin Mobile. Growth marketing at Netflix in the UK, leading retail marketing for iTunes at Apple in Europe, all before returning to the U S and playing key roles at both Jumpstart in Cleveland and the Drive Capital in Columbus, Ohio, where he served as Chief Talent Officer for a little over nine years.

[00:00:58] Ron Laneve: On top of all that, he recently returned from a worldwide tour / sabbatical with his family. I couldn’t be more pleased to introduce to you this man of many accomplishments, founder of 10X Talent Robert Hatta. Robert, thanks for being with me today. 

[00:01:13] Robert Hatta: Thank you, Ron, for that kind introduction.  I’m happy to be here and happy to share whatever experiences I’ve had that you think are fun or useful. 

[00:01:21] Ron Laneve: I appreciate that. And the best part is, I don’t think I even hit on everything. So I left some things in there, probably for you to talk about as we go. But as you and I talked about briefly one of my biggest motivations for these conversations is to illustrate the concept of the nonlinear career path through discussing people’s careers and, yours is one of those.

[00:01:40] Ron Laneve: And although I mentioned a lot of the places you’ve been, the key part is really the how and the why around the moves you made. Were some of them intentional were some of them pure serendipity. I’m sure it’s a mix of both. Could you run us through your career background and trajectory and, focus on the how’s and the why and lessons learned along the way?

[00:02:00] Robert Hatta: Sure, I think we’re both Gen Xers, Ron, but my career has been always very millennial. And the first bit of that was really circumstantial and based on a lot of luck and timing and location. Going to undergrad, as you mentioned to Stanford in the mid 90s without intention put me in the heart of Silicon Valley while the internet was emerging. And that first tech bubble that came out of it was really starting to take off. I’m graduating into an economy that’s booming and that boom is epicentered right on top of where I was geographically at the time. And by no design or intention, I just ended up working in the tech industry.

[00:02:48] Robert Hatta: Like a lot of my peers and colleagues, if I had gone to school on the east coast, I probably would have ended up in banking or wall street. My brother went to an east coast college. All of his friends migrated there. So it was really circumstantial and happenstance.  But it ended up fitting me really well because as it turned out, I really enjoy highly dynamic work environments where, a young person with not a lot of experience or proven talent can get a lot of responsibility and be thrown into these high growth environments where you’re able to deliver very quickly and learn very quickly and you’re surrounded by very entrepreneurial peers.

[00:03:28] Robert Hatta: It turned out I love it. And in the few instances where I’ve not been in those environments. I’ve not done well and it’s validated that was where I wanted to be all along, even though I didn’t do anything to get there. And that’s the way it was for me early on. As you do in the tech startup world, bounce from opportunity to opportunity or job to job. Sometimes that’s opportunistic bouncing up because, there’s a hot startup and and you want to be a part of it. And if you can get on early, it can be a really, not only exciting, but lucrative ride. 

[00:04:03] Robert Hatta: Other times it’s bouncing the other direction. That exciting high potential startup crash and burns and you and a bunch of other people are finally at the same time out of a job. And I’ve been on both sides of that multiple times. What that translates into on a LinkedIn profile is a lot of different jobs from what would’ve been previous generations been considered short tenures.

[00:04:24] Robert Hatta: That’s where that sort of millennial style career path took over simply because of volatility and how things move both in the creation and scale stage all the way down to the crash and ending stage of tech companies and startups. 

[00:04:42] Robert Hatta: It was actually after the 3rd time I had been laid off by a tech company inside of a 4 or 5 year period and I was really distraught at this point. It had been, the early part of my career, 5, 6 years, and I was leaving my 4th job or something like that. Yes I recognize the volatility of the environment I was in. But at the same time, I was questioning if if I could keep up with and endure the ups and downs after, a series of doubts.

[00:05:16] Robert Hatta: This was in 2004 I had been sent to London with my boss at Netflix to help launch and grow and oversee and manage what would be the first international expansion of Netflix. Mind you, this is 2003 2004 Netflix, DVD by mail Netflix. Not streaming company, not global movie studio Netflix.

[00:05:39] Robert Hatta: And we were there in country for about six months when the company in response to Amazon entering the market, decided to really focus on the core business, on the core geography of the United States. We were still at that point battling Blockbuster, Walmart and then downloading, not quite streaming, but downloading was starting to emerge as a competitive threat.

[00:06:01] Robert Hatta: And Amazon and Apple and others were seen as the next in a long line of companies that would take from Netflix, what it had built. The decision strategically was to pull the plug on all these other initiatives that weren’t quite essential and really focus in on the home market and protecting it.

[00:06:17] Robert Hatta: And that was the right decision. I got it. But at the same time, that meant one of two things for me. Pack things up with my then girlfriend, now wife who had left graduate school to move to Europe with me and for this opportunity. Go back and plug back into Silicon Valley and the life and the trajectory we had there. Or leave the company, but stay in Europe in London. And this is late 20s, pre kids pre marriage as I shared but we went out there together, my wife and I, with this vision for having, an international expat experience.

[00:06:54] Robert Hatta: You can imagine that being available to you at different stages of life, but it looks very different post kids and family than it does pre kids and family. And we really wanted to have that experience and ended up prioritizing that over career stability and returning with Netflix. But that unplanned dislocation from what was a really exciting path of leading this new expansion effort for Netflix in Europe, went from there to not there in a very short period of time.

[00:07:25] Robert Hatta: And it was jarring. And we decided to stay and give it a go, but we had no prospects. My visa to work there legally, went with my job. My wife who would later get her visa and nursing licensure transferred over… that hadn’t yet occurred. So we’re, it was a really uncertain scenario for us to stay. And it caused me to, for the first time, really reflect what am I doing with my career? Is this highly volatile, up and down exciting and dynamic, but highly volatile startup career, tech startup career path really what I want?

[00:08:02] Robert Hatta: Because it’s been a rocky road from, since, the bubble crashed in 2000. And and an old friend and former boss and mentor to me said, Hey, man. We are the choices we continually make, and you’ve continued to make these choices to opt into these environments knowing each time that it’s going to be uncertain, and it’s going to be volatile, and it may not work out well, but you keep doing it anyway and you can try the other side and find the stable, predictable job at the big, stable, predictable company.

[00:08:36] Robert Hatta: But, he knew enough about me and had the maturity to see it in ways I couldn’t to say, I think you’ve chosen this path. So you either switch and risk that’s just a move out of alignment with who you really are, or you accept it. And start to build the skills to adapt and just understand this is what happens.

[00:08:55] Robert Hatta: And that’s the first, I’d say, conscious, intentional career path decision I ever made was, all right, I’m going to stay in this side of the sort of the economy and the job world, because I do like, you know, moving quickly and having autonomy and breaking ground instead of incrementally improving what other people might have done before me. I like that. Too much. And if it means I need to be okay with losing my job abruptly outside of the reasons outside of my control every couple of years or that I’ll get, I’ll do a few things that are really exciting and get bored and have to change a job on my own decision every couple of years.

[00:09:43] Robert Hatta: That’s okay. And I just need to build that whatever skillsets required to do that. And that means maintaining relationships and helping people. And doing the things that ends up I really enjoy and eventually what we’re able to turn into a job and a career. We’re starting to take hold in terms of if you know you’re going to move around inside of an industry and take on new challenges, hopefully deliver great results and then move on. You approach the world of opportunity, approach the world of relationship all very differently. It’s not Hey, I need help. Let’s get together and have a coffee or, Hey, I need something. But it’s like I’m, this web of relationships and not just the ones you target and form, but you now worked intensely at a bunch of different places, which means you now have equally intense and positive relationships with really talented people.

[00:10:36] Robert Hatta: And I just started to recognize and put intention behind that as a sort of a compensation mechanism for what I knew would be a volatile and ambiguous career path going forward by choice. 

[00:10:53] Ron Laneve: Wow, there’s a lot there to unpack. So I think then Jumpstart in Cleveland was your transition into what I’ll call the full time talent space, right? You and I both know in everything you’ve ever done and everything we do. Recruiting talent, being part of developing talent is part of what you do. But at Jumpstart, you had a key focus on that. So was that intentional? How did that transition happen? 

[00:11:22] Robert Hatta: It was intentional, yes, but as an adaptation to a new set of circumstances. So similar to the decision where my wife and I decided, you know what, we’re going to stay in London. We’re going to live out this experience in the way we want to while we can before that window closes. And that, that translated into three years we spent there.

[00:11:43] But we similarly decided the time is now shifting towards prioritizing our families. We’re going to get married, we want to start a family we can continue this life abroad and do those things. But it’d probably be better and more aligned with doing the things we care about if we did it close to home where our parents live, both sets of our parents live in Northeast Ohio, and it was important for us to have our kids know their grandparents, our parents know their grandkids. 

[00:12:10] Robert Hatta: Really only one way to do that and that was to move home. And that sort of changed the context of my approach to career. Moving back home to Northeast Ohio is a very different environment from where my career was headed. Had I stayed in London or in San Francisco. I was leaving Apple in its iTunes group a month after they launched the iPhone. So it was a very different suite of options. The positive side of that, which ended up becoming a huge blessing as I moved things forward in my career was things were, really interesting things were really starting to happen in Cleveland and Ohio and places outside of Silicon Valley. Startups and tech companies and the necessary ingredients to forming and growing them were no longer exclusive to the cities on the coasts. Cloud infrastructure, open source software, APIs, these things which were obfuscating the need to build all of this stuff from the ground up, which you used to have to do when you built a technology product. And to do that, you needed very specific engineers that were almost entirely located on the coast. Now, all of those things were rentable commodities in the cloud.

[00:13:28] Ron Laneve: And access to capital finally in this area too.

[00:13:30] Robert Hatta: And the capital access and other things were becoming open source basically. So you could be anywhere ideally next to a customer or market, many of which don’t live on the coasts and envision and get some of the resources, not in the same abundance, but some of the resources you need to build that into a real company.

[00:13:48] Robert Hatta: And I was coming home right as that was really starting to happen with a lot of relevant experiences. It turned out having operated in similar environments, my whole career. It was really just, again, similar to the post graduation. It was just right time, right place. Really wasn’t driven by this prioritized decision to move back home.

[00:14:11] Robert Hatta: So that’s what I did. And Jumpstart was really the opportunity to apply that experience in a different way. I had been a product manager where I was launching new products. I had been in business development distribution, where I was taking existing products into new geographies and markets. That was my background. Now, in parallel, I worked really closely with a lot of the different functions across a tech company. You’ve got finance, you’ve got marketing, of course, like any other company, sales, you have product management, design, engineering and the roles I’ve had always sat in the middle of that. And what that gave me was a really strong understanding of what are the pieces of a team that go together? And how does that change from one growth stage to the next? And then two, what really good looks like in those functions? Cause I’ve worked on some pretty special teams along the way.

[00:15:04] Robert Hatta: And instead of coming back and saying, Hey, I’m good at building and launching or taking products in the new markets. What I realized quickly in Cleveland was people could do that. That wasn’t a special skill I had, but what they lacked was the sort of understanding and toolkit that goes into building the teams around these products or around these early stage companies that are hoping to scale.

[00:15:26] Robert Hatta: And while that wasn’t something I had explicitly done as a part of my job description, I’d been on those teams, a central function in those teams. I’d seen all of that. That high quality work around me. And I’ve been on some rocket ship rides where I had to hire an interview and recruit a bunch of people myself to my own team.

[00:15:43] Robert Hatta: So I came with a point of view and a playbook on the talent and the people outside of things. And that’s where I saw the greatest need in Northeast Ohio. And jumpstart was kind enough to give me an opportunity and a platform to grow that sort of point of view as well as help the companies that invested in do it for themselves. Hire and build their teams put in place the people ops or the recruiting infrastructure needed to get from this stage to the next seat, their boards. And grow on the people side of things versus just, revenue and product future enhancement and that’s been what I’ve been doing for the last 15 years now.

[00:16:21] Ron Laneve: To rewind a little bit, you went to Stanford, you major in economics, right?And like you said, You happen to be in, the middle of one of the greatest booms we’ve ever been in, in the location of Silicon Valley, where it was happening at the time. When you went to major in economics, did you have any vision of what you planned on doing after college?

[00:16:41] Ron Laneve: And when I’m trying to absolutely not, you’re the epitome of my story, right? Econ major in college. Tech companies, growth marketing, product marketing, business development, then parlaying all of that, which perfectly makes sense into talent. But you didn’t start this journey when you went to college thinking, I’m going to lead talent someday, for investment company that’s building startup companies. So it’s just the stories like this. They’re just to me are just fantastic. 

[00:17:08] Robert Hatta: I wish it was a plan versus, a series of fortunate circumstances which really leads to, the more recent chapter of my career path is a return to being intentional and not just in sort of the work I do which isn’t that different from what I’ve done over these last 15 years. It’s more around how I do that work. The last decade or so inside a very successful, large, much larger scale venture capital fund, leading the talent function as well as being the internal chief talent officer of a company that went from 4 or 5 people to 40 people, which isn’t a huge amount of growth for a tech company, but for a venture firm is. All of that was really intense and all consuming. And it should be. We were trying to do something that’s never been done before, which is to build a large scale, successful venture capital fund, not based in Silicon Valley, Boston, or New York. And really creating something at a scale that had never existed before is hard and audacious and full of risk and requires total commitment. And that’s entirely how I’ve been focused for most of that decade, but that comes at a cost. It turns out it came at a cost higher than I was willing to pay over the longer term, time away from family, time away from my wife. 

[00:18:28] Robert Hatta: And so many things like, like I’ve mentioned before, where we had come together and made conscious decisions driven by what we care about personally, even at the expense of career opportunity. I think that’s one of the other patterns is that decision to stay in London versus return with Netflix, that was not only a career path risk. It very, in very real terms, cost me millions of dollars. If I held onto my stock options through vesting that were granted to me at that time, 2004 you don’t have to Google too far onto the internet to find out what that stock price has done in those years.

[00:19:11] Robert Hatta: Leaving Apple as it launches the iPhone, not a good career move, but made based on a shared set of values and priorities with my wife and partner. That was a path I needed to get back on after an almost decade long, singularly focused pursuit of helping build Drive Capital. Required a break and required me to, think about not just the work I’m doing, which I’ve always enjoyed, but how I’m doing it and at what expense.

[00:19:40] Robert Hatta: And right now, after this sabbatical we took. I would describe my work is the same as I would have described it a Jumpstart or Drive.. But it’s on my own and I’m free to pick who whom I work with. And the hours of the day in which I work and make time and space for the other things that matter. That’s the most recent intentional decision that sort of shifted things along my career path but in a very different way. 

[00:20:04] Ron Laneve: Yeah, good for you. Good for you. So why don’t we talk about that? Tell me about 10x. I know. You had spun this up several years ago, maybe put it on the shelf and then brought it back out now, intentionally. What is it? What are you doing? Who are you serving? Tell me about your services. 

[00:20:19] Robert Hatta: Yeah, it’s not different than what I did with the previous 2 firms, but it really centers around this core assumption that when a company receives funding or is otherwise experiencing the type of growth and momentum where the future stated in vision is very different from where it is today. And those founders of those companies usually tell you pretty concisely how they’re going to get from here to there when it comes to, product roadmap, technology. These are the go to market strategies we’re going to implement. There’s a lot of thought that goes into to, to that strategy or those strategies. 

[00:20:56] Robert Hatta: But when you ask them how they’re going to get their people. You either get no response or something that’s oversimplified. Like we’ll just hire a bunch of engineers or we’ll build out an enterprise go to market team.

[00:21:08] Robert Hatta: And while that might be the correct answer. How do you do that requires a suite of capabilities and functions and technology and best practice. That the founders have usually very limited, if any, experience implementing. And I’ve, I’ve done it myself inside of companies and operating roles and I’ve seen it done, across the spectrum from terribly to really well at hundreds of companies that I’ve revised and worked with over the years.

[00:21:33] Robert Hatta: My offering is to come and help them map out the journey from the company they have today to the company they want to have and call it 12 to 24 months on a trajectory toward this broader vision all around the people ops and talent side. 

[00:21:50] Robert Hatta: What are your capabilities and how do they need to adapt? In terms of internal functions, the people who do them the seniority of those people in a lot of cases is a higher profile than the company might have ever hired before. The volume of people is typically at a higher level than anything they’ve ever hired before the work of the infrastructure and the process and the systems that need to be implemented to support that. Are there people ops things that you need to do now that you didn’t have to do before? Like internal communication or performance management or retention programs, manager training, executive team alignment. 

[00:22:25] Robert Hatta: These are all things in the portfolio of what I’ve helped other companies put together so that they can grow up, essentially. And meanwhile, a critical part of all of this is there will most certainly be key roles identified in this process of what you need to do to grow up. And I might know a lot of people who can fill those roles and that network that I’ve built over the decades really comes to play in terms of making, Thoughtful curated introductions matches really.

[00:22:56] Ron Laneve: So let me switch gears a little bit. 2 segments. For students, soon to be exiting college who are entering the workforce and thinking about how do I best prepare myself for what’s next? Any advice for them on how to best position themselves, whether it’s, here’s key trends that I see in the market around technology, obviously AI is low hanging fruit, but from that ranging from how to best separate themselves from other people when they’re competing for opportunities and how to, put their best foot forward? 

[00:23:26] Robert Hatta: Yeah there’s a lot there. I spent enough time over the last 15 years, even though I’m older now engaging a lot of college students or recent grads. Whether it’s trying to draw them into our companies or create programs that do that or engaging, schools of entrepreneurship or engineering departments at different colleges that are around here and big talent factories. And those are essential for a company in a region to be successful building tech startups. You have to have that smart, young, and often technical talent and plenty of it. So I’ve spent a lot of time with younger folks at the beginning of their careers than than my cohort would typically my age and experience cohort.

[00:24:12] What I’ve observed is the universities are doing just as bad of a job teaching and encouraging and supporting their students and being thoughtful about whether it’s career or educational planning. And those aren’t necessarily the same thing. They’re being just, they’re just as bad, at that as they were when I was in college 30 years ago. And high school guidance counselors and parents. 

[00:24:39] Robert Hatta: Most college graduates I have spoken with over the years are either just as clueless as I was or victim to the same sort of extrinsic forces. What do my parents want me to do based on their very, very limited backgrounds, whether they went to college at all, or they’re the only understand the career path they’ve been on, or what are my peers doing? My roommate just got up and put a suit on and ran out the door, a couple hours earlier than he ever wakes up. What the hell is that about? Like the, what my peers are doing, whether it’s summer or job interviews or careers or major selection, like that’s a big influencer extrinsically.

[00:25:21] Robert Hatta: So the students high school and college are still forced to read the tea leaves slash consume. So the near proximity influences to inform very big life decisions and very big personal investments and without a whole lot of information, which is crazy given how accessible information is these days.

[00:25:47] Robert Hatta: And I think that the first thing I advise people to do is as young as I can is do the exploration necessary to even figure out what you’re interested in and what you’re good at. And, people always say, and oversimplify, follow your passion, find your passion. That’s really great, but that’s not easy to do. It takes decades. It takes a ton of data collection. How do you know what you’re passionate about if you’ve only grown up with one sort of narrow experience? And that would describe people well into their careers in a lot of cases. So in those years, whether it’s high school or college or whatever to expand Your experience set laterally as much as possible before deciding how to bring it in and start to focus is the first advice I give folks and and that could be as simple as, you know what? I know you really want to have a summer internship between your software and junior year to beef up your resume and sets you up for that great internship after your junior year. Why not wait tables or serve drinks at a bar? In Cape Cod this summer or go be a mountain bike guide in Jackson hole? Or work in construction back home, do something that is going to one give you a different set of experiences and a group of people to observe and learn from.

[00:27:13] Robert Hatta: And two do something that you’ll never have a chance to do again in your career. restaurant industry jobs, service industry jobs. I’m a huge proponent of doing your time there because it’s not only a great way to get exposed to different perspectives or maybe even live in a destination you wouldn’t normally live in. But man, you learn a ton. About serving customers, working together with front of house and back of house staff. How to operate with urgency, improvise, put on a good face, like all the things that go into being a likable productive team member. I don’t think there’s a better way to learn that than serving drinks or waiting tables.

[00:27:55] Robert Hatta: My advice comes from that perspective of try a lot of things. Don’t just presume that what your parents want or what your peers are doing is the path. And in some cases, if that means putting off college or taking classes that don’t count towards some highly practical major.

[00:28:14] Robert Hatta: There are some people who go into it, rightly convinced they want to be a doctor or a computer scientist or an engineer or a nurse or whatever that, that here’s the path here, the classes you take. And here’s what you do to get that first job. Some people have that and they’re lucky. But most people don’t.

[00:28:35] Robert Hatta: And when you come out on the other side, you may still have gotten a, an economics degree from Stanford, but that doesn’t mean you have any better sense of what the hell you’re doing and where you should be, and you’re really just hoping for luck, which is what benefited me in terms of those opportunities being really well aligned to me and what I like to do.

[00:28:56] Robert Hatta: But on the flip side, you can end up Going down a path for a decade or more and realizing I don’t even know how I got here and I, but I definitely know this isn’t where I want to be. And it’s a hard road backwards in many cases to the point where where you came off track and off alignment with where you thought you wanted to go.

[00:29:18] Robert Hatta: Had you thought about it more and it leaves a lot of people feeling trapped.

[00:29:23] Ron Laneve: That’s good advice. I haven’t thought about it that way. I have a son in college and with my obviously career and recruiting. I’m like, get your internship your freshman year, get way ahead of all your peers. And second year, you’re going to be, you’re going to be in line for even better internships because you already had 1, right?

[00:29:39] Ron Laneve: And by the time you graduate, you’re going to be, but that’s good advice. I guess I’ll let him watch this one. 

[00:29:43] Ron Laneve: You’ve interviewed, I can imagine a lot of people in your career and you’ve helped grow a lot of companies, not just Drive and the 40 people there, but all the different companies you had your hands into, under the Drive umbrella, right?

[00:29:56] Ron Laneve: Can you share some of your experiences for experienced talent around how to better differentiate themselves from their peers? Any key anecdotes from your from your time that you’ve seen that really, stand out?

[00:30:09] Robert Hatta: Yeah, and I’ll be clear up front. It’s always. The lens I’ve I’ve been looking through all of these years is strictly limited to early stage to high growth technology startups. And that’s a very different context to, a lot of different other sectors of the job economy. And what’s needed and what works in our industry and our corner of the world is very different from what’s needed in works in other places. So what stands out to me is as necessary and important. It’s going to be very different. And very, in this case, very specific to tech startups.

[00:30:45] Robert Hatta: But I do think there are similarities given how quickly things are changing now and not just in the space of tech companies, but everywhere. Forgetting skills and backgrounds and tenure and everything like that. I care about and look for three things. The first is intentionality. I keep coming back to this, but eventually a fully formed adult figures out. And I say eventually within intention as well. Whether it takes you two years or 20 to get there. Better to get there late than never. Better to get in control of where you do and what you do and what you get from it than to always be down a path that you didn’t choose. 

[00:31:30] Robert Hatta: So I look for intentionality. Has your career over time taken shape to where you know what you’re good at, you know what you enjoy and you make conscious choices. Around the strategies you take the jobs you move around to and things like that. The people you surround yourself with if you don’t minimally have that one I think it’s hard to be successful without that. And two joining a startup is not a thing to consider lightly. It’s a major commitment. You’re going to be working harder than you, you have before getting paid less than you are probably worth with a very uncertain outcome that any of that will pay off and to do so without.

[00:32:10] Robert Hatta: Intention and a pattern that demonstrates this is a fit for you. It’s just, it’s bad for you. It’s bad for us, bad for our company. So intentionality matters a ton. 

[00:32:20] Robert Hatta: The second thing I look for is adaptability. Inside of tech companies and startups. But I also think increasingly everywhere else, you need to be comfortable with change. And I don’t mean that you’re like, okay with it and tolerant of it. I mean that you adapt and adapt means you, you change. You learn, you grow as the world around you shifts. It’s not that you’re just okay with it. You have to be able to keep up with it. You have to be able to learn and perform. And that’s the third piece I look for is you consistently produce great results in whatever that is. 

[00:32:58] Robert Hatta: So you have this career path that increasingly demonstrates intentional choices. Within that plenty of examples of where you’ve had to learn new things, shift gears, change directions and consistently over those experiences, you do so and deliver great results again and again.

[00:33:17] Robert Hatta: Which means you, you’re not only okay with adapting, you not only learn really quickly, but you apply that learning to being very good at something that you probably weren’t even doing, a short time ago. So those are the three things I always look for in folks. 

[00:33:33] Ron Laneve: Would it be fair to add in or maybe augment that with failure is going to happen along that way, right?

[00:33:40] Ron Laneve: Failure. Oh, yeah. Great results doesn’t mean that you never fail, right? Adaptability, I think, is producing great results probably from failing once in a while. Is that fair? Have you seen that? Is that people think I can’t fail but that’s not true at all. You actually probably learn a lot more from failing once a while. or going down the wrong path. 

[00:33:59] Robert Hatta: Totally. And you can be intentional in avoiding opportunities to fail. But I think adaptation requires you are in an environment where you’re not comfortable where you’ve never been before. And therefore, failure is an option. The risk of failure is present.

[00:34:16] Robert Hatta: So I wrap it into that adaptability. And if you’re learning at the pace that’s required and you’re also making, but recovering from mistakes all the time. So you are right. And maybe I should pull that out and make it a 4th thing. I look for, because startups have such a high risk of failure or the people inside of them have such high risk of failing to do what they’re there to do. You have to be comfortable, which means you’re very well acquainted with failure throughout your career.

[00:34:48] Robert Hatta: And if you’re not, then you’re minimally not going to be a suitable fit for these environments. But also are you even trying that hard, if you’re not, if you don’t have a list and maybe even a long list of screwups.

[00:35:01] Ron Laneve: Well, Robert, I appreciate this. This has been incredibly helpful. And like I said, I think we’re gonna have to do another session here in the near future around a couple of these other subjects because you’ve opened up some things I want to talk about some more, but thanks again for your time.

[00:35:14] Ron Laneve: Yeah, happy to, anytime. Good luck with 10x and I can’t wait to watch that grow too. 

[00:35:19] Ron Laneve: Thanks man. Thanks for having me. 

[00:35:21] Okay.

 

 

February 27, 2024