Yesterday FirstRain celebrated Halloween and this year we invited all of the Rainmakers’ kids to partake in the festivities! In preparation for the party, each section of the office was given a pumpkin to carve and each team really went all out. I was surprised by the creativity each team brought to their pumpkin, from Nick’s “pumpkin eating another” pumpkin to Daniela’s “green wig” pumpkin, to my team’s very own “carrot” pumpkin— they were all awesome! During the party we let the kids pick a winner and Carolyn/ Laura’s “cat” pumpkin came out victorious.
Julie organized a Halloween scavenger hunt and each kid received a Halloween themed good bag—filled with candy. The kids were very excited (although the parents probably not so much).
The party was a fun excuse to bring all of the FirstRain kids together and they sure were cute!
The day of the Airtel Delhi Half Marathon, September 30th 2012, finally arrived; the pinnacle of lots of hard work (or not so hard) for thirteen Rainmakers. The alarm bells rang at 3:45 AM on Sunday morning. It may have crossed our minds to hit the snooze, but the excitement of the marathon was enough to drag us out of bed.
The night before the big day was tough. Most of the participants were nervous, with the fear of not completing the race on time (or at all) weighing on us. We loaded up on both sleep and hydration, downing 4-5 liters of Gatorade in the 24 hours leading up to race day. Well in advance of the starting time, participants lingered near the course with running bibs pinned to their t-shirts and timing chips fastened to their shoes. Some listened to music to relax their minds. The morning was cool and breezy. Varun and Priyankar were the first of the Rainmakers to reach the packed venue. The DJ’s music filled the morning air as people stretched their sleepy muscles and fit in last minute exercises. At last, amid many speculations, our MYSTERY RUNNER was revealed. Nobody could have guessed our mystery runner was Gaurav Chauhan, who had been following a very secret regimen of workouts and an office diet of carrots, almonds, sprouts and apricots.
We gathered at the starting point, where people of all ages had turned up for the mega event. Moving forward wasn’t easy, as thousands of people with the same idea shoved and pushed their way through. The weather gods were not generous at the race’s 6:40 AM start time. As we reached India Gate, the scorching sun made every step more difficult. But each Rainmaker’s mind was consumed by only one thought: to complete the race. From the first stride, a sense of team spirit and competitiveness drove the Rainmakers. In a moment of pure concentration captured by event cameras, Varun and Mohammad Athar ran side by side for a full minute, but didn’t notice each other until reviewing the marathon photos after the race. Along the way, Rainmakers were encouraged by each other, motivated by the sheer number of other runners, and supported by well-organized event facilities. Cooling tunnels, oranges, water points, energy drinks, mobile toilets, and cold sponges at various places aided Rainmakers toward their destination.
Sanjay Shankar, a dedicated competitor from the beginning, finished the race with an impressive 13.10 miles in 2:27:29. His impromptu victory dance at the finish line was caught on camera and acquired Facebook fame. His enthusiasm spoke for all of the competing Rainmakers, who finished the race with complete participation.
Close to 32,000 people, including athletes and celebrities, turned up for the race. The spirit of the marathon is alive and well among Rainmakers. This year thirteen of us competed in the race, and we hope to see our numbers grow next year.
FirstRain India had another great team-building event this week! These events allow people from different departments to come together and team up to excel in an entirely different setting, and this was our first event since forming teams in June (you can read more about our team building events here). It was fun to see them in action!
For this event, each team nominated four members to work together and come up with a unique costume, made completely out of newspaper. They had 30 minutes to complete the project. One member of each team then modeled the costume for the entire FirstRain India Team. It was great to see the teams work closely together and come up with some fantastic ideas
By the end of the 30 minutes we had some great costumes, ranging from a tribal prince, to a queen, to an Indian mother (rooting for their Olympic athletes!). We voted on the best costume and it came down to Preeti (representing “Team Avengers” dressed as a modern Indian Woman) and Priyanker (representing “Team The Y-Nots” dressed as Eklavya). Priyankar received the most votes and the win went to “Team The Y-Nots”!
The event demonstrated our team’s creativity and efficiency, and was a lot of fun!
We try to capture everything – we really do. But the reality is so much of our wisdom is in our heads and it’s never more apparent than when trying to train someone new.
At FirstRain we have a new executive – the fabulous Daniela Barbosa who just joined us from Dow Jones. She’s smart and experienced and I want to bring her up to speed as fast as possible but pointing her to our systems is, I know, simply insufficient. We think we capture everything about our users and workflow in our salesforce CRM system. We think we capture our contracts in Netsuite and our central wiki. But of course so much of the deep knowledge is tribal – to quote Wikipedia “Tribal knowledge is any unwritten information that is known within a tribe but often unknown outside of it.”
The reality is that the really interesting stuff about your customers, your technology, why people truly buy is in people’s heads. Our customer facing technical team knows the customer’s workflow, the nuances of why they want one choice over another, what internal projects – and opposition – they are facing and need our system to help them solve. It’s impossible to write it all down, and so it’s crucial to share as much verbally as possible.
And it’s one of the reasons that turnover can be so damaging to companies.
Sometimes turnover is good. If you want to change the culture of a company you typically will have to change 50% of the leadership — or more as when Cadence fired it’s entire executive team. If you want to dramatically change your strategy and go-to-market you have to change your business team — as Dell is now bravely doing.
But short of dramatic change, turnover is expensive simply because you lose and have to re-learn so much tribal knowledge. Especially with your R&D team and with customer support. The R&D team knows where the bodies are buried in the code; the customer support team knows the truth about customer use and where they find value.
It is, of course, important to document the knowledge you have, but when you are growing and moving fast it is also important to value, and protect tribal knowledge and bring your team together frequently and efficiently to talk through and share what’s in people’s heads.
Long meetings can progressively sap energy and create altered states of being. Yes they can.
We went offsite as a management team for 2 days this weekend to talk through our strategy and 2012 planning. 11 of us in 2 houses at Pajaro Dunes, lots of flip charts, heated discussions, cooking together, walking on the beach and generally spending time together thinking about our business. It was really fun but, even so, it was intense and, combined with long discussions late into the night about the state of the world accompanied by some excellent wines, pretty tiring for some.
Two of our jokesters memorialized their progressive states of mind as they helped clean up after the meeting. They sent me the photos – the editorial is all mine.
Thanks Nima and Ryan – it was fun – and despite the warm sun and sand, amazingly productive!
FirstRain celebrated the holiday season on Monday with our annual company potluck and a lively version of the white elephant gift exchange game. As usual, the FirstRain “chefs” brought in a variety of fantastic foods, ranging from Thomas’ salmon to Doug’s Chili!
This year, FirstRain made sure to leave most of the gag gifts at home (well, besides a banana holder and a re-gifted gift). Bottles of wine and alcohol were high in demand and eagerly fought for. Julie ended up with the best gift, a bottle of wine and jars of David’s homemade jams and jellies. Eugene received the “worst gift”, a re-gifted chip dish. However, ironically the worst gift was brought in by Eugene, himself! Julie and Eugene won office gifts, a brand new iPad2 and Kindle Touch.
The party was a big hit and we’ll definitely continue the tradition next year. It was a perfect way to end a fantastic year.
We’re looking forward to 2012 and the exciting events that lie ahead for FirstRain.
Happy Holidays!
When we take on a new employee here at FirstRain, a lot of thought and energy is put into ensuring they are a really great fit. And so, unsurprisingly, when we recently expanded our sales engineering team, in the summer, it took us a few months and a couple job description rewrites to find our ideal candidate. Through that process I realized something interesting: what we needed in our early days when the FirstRain solution was still evolving is not what we need today.
Like many growing companies, in our early days we had a great idea and strong core technology but went through a process of understanding the real needs of the market and adapting our solution over time. In such an environment, the sales engineering role needed to be focused on tinkering and crafting solutions, managing clients, demonstrating consultative selling skills, architecting solutions and acting as a product specialist—really whatever needed to get done to help our growing customer base to “seamlessly” adapt the product to their needs and get the job done!
Needless to say, finding the perfect person to fit those chameleon-like standards was a bit tricky! At that time, we focused on finding an individual who could demonstrate analytical abilities and design thinking, who would excel in flexible environments, and would thrive as part of the tight relationship between our client solutions team, product development and leadership. This was essential in order to take important customer input and feed it back into our organization for immediate development or adaptation. In other words, bending the product to the customer’s will.
Although times like that are exciting and fun, they’re not easy. There were days that made you want to hide under your bed, and others where you were thumping your chest, knowing that that you are cracking the code. At times, every couple of weeks, we’d modify the sales process to see how we can shorten the sales cycle, increase close ratios and triage the outliers. Back then, we were correcting and adjusting, correcting and adjusting, getting ever closer to a repeatable solution and support model that worked across our target markets, or sometimes, just axing a target market from the list completely.
But as we started to hire for the team again in the summer of 2011—even though we had many extraordinary candidates—something was off.
We realized: the candidates were right, it was the job description that was wrong—wrong for the kind of company we are now. Today, FirstRain has a sophisticated solution set, clear target market and crisp sales process. In this environment, we now needed a different role, a more focused role that corresponds to what our customers need us to do today: Listen & Match.
As we noted in our (now updated) job description, today’s FirstRain Sales Engineers need to:
Listen to prospects and the account executive to validate and better match the solutions offered with the prospects business challenge. Asking good questions becomes critical, executing on the deliverable and work on workflow issues with the prospect becomes paramount.
With a new job description the resumes began to roll in, and we started to interview 3-5 candidates a week, it became clear … the new candidates matched what we needed today.
As our solutions have matured, we are no longer looking for people whose main skill was “bending” the product to do whatever a given customer needed. Instead, we now need people who deeply understand the capabilities of our solution set, can demonstrate design thinking, as well as understand the business challenges our customers experience – to effectively bridge that gap, develop a rollout plan, and execute! It’s often a delicate dance, and one that still requires great flexibility. Instead of ‘Solution Benders’ we now need ‘Solution Dancers’, a role which is more nuanced, more sophisticated, and, I’m starting to find, is a lot more fun to manage.
One of the best ways I’ve found to build community in the office is by working together to give back to the greater community. Last week, the FirstRain team and I continued our annual tradition of volunteering at the Second Harvest Food Bank. SHFB is a fantastic organization that strives to end local hunger around the San Francisco Bay Area. I was pleasantly surprised (and impressed with the massive amount of food to sort) to learn that gathering and collecting enough food was not the organization’s main concern. The great need for volunteers, like those of us from FirstRain, is necessary in order to help sort the food. Kristin Sulpizio, the Director of Volunteer Services told us the “the food is there, it’s finding people to help figure out what to do with all of it, is our problem”.
FirstRain participated in this event not only to give back to the local community but to hopefully encourage others to follow in our footsteps. I know activities like this strengthen our own FirstRain community. Working together outside of the office allows my team to engage in an experience that deepens their sense of shared values, such as social responsibility and caring for others. Every year, I know I can count on our team to clear their busy schedules, to show up and to work very hard. This morale is later translated inside the office, all part of the many reasons why FirstRain’s company culture is so dynamic.
Everyone got his or her hands dirty that day. Working as a team, we were able to quickly and successfully sort through a hefty amount of food in our two-hour time slot. Thanks to the entire FirstRain team’s effort, we helped 236,000 people receive food this month! The day was a huge success and everyone left the bank in great spirits. As always, I was pleased and proud to see my team come together for such a great cause –and one we will continue to support!
I have a pet peeve that got me thinking. My peeve is people who say “I’ll call you” or “I’ll email you some times to connect” and then don’t. It’s the modern equivalent of the Hollywood brush off “Let’s do lunch”. One of my service providers did this to me last week and it’s annoying and unprofessional, and it got me to thinking again about how important expectations are.
Satisfying other people really is all about setting their expectations, and it’s especially true in business.
The ultimate is meeting your quarterly numbers. AAPL was slammed because they missed their financial expectations even though profits had grown dramatically. If you say you are going to report X and you report X-1 you are going to get dinged in today’s short term market. It’s a no win for the public company CEO and the great ones understand it’s a long term game, but the CFOs make their stripes on setting expectations right consistently.
Next is product schedules. There is discipline to this skill. You want to be aggressive to stretch the team and yet hit the dates you set because the rest of your business team is planning on it. Literally. Planning customer roll out, planning PR, so major delays play havoc with customer expectations. I very much admire my business partner YY and her ability to think through every aspect of the product release, set the company’s expectation at 95%, consistently deliver that 95% and sometimes deliver the upside of 100%. Everyone’s needs are met and our products leap forward every month.
Then there is your relationships. Californians seem very friendly at first, and then are hard to get close to. The English are frosty at first and then warm up. In business, be clear about your relationships. Are you work colleagues or friends… can your companion truly be him or herself in all his or her dumbness at times, or do they always need to be wary ? Are you loyal or fickle at heart? Obviously you can’t signal this early in a relationship but there comes a time when you can, and it’s just more efficient.
Arrive when you say you are going to arrive. Being late is the ultimate in bad manners – it says you think your time is more important than my time.
And if you tell me you are going to do something for heaven’s 
sake do it or don’t tell me in the first place! It just makes me grumpy.
At FirstRain many of our technical and support team are located in Gurgaon just outside of New Delhi in India. Because it is very important that the US based team and the India based team work closely together we not only travel to Gurgaon several times a year, we also bring Gurgaon team members out to San Mateo from time to time for product design sessions, for training and to improve our support process.
Earlier this month Sagar and Nitin came out for 2 weeks and since they were here over a weekend we decided to take them for a classic California experience – wine tasting at Ridge Winery. Ridge is in Cupertino up on the Montebello ridge and offers spectacular views of the Bay Area, plus a warm garden to picnic in and wine tasting for those that drink. We put together a picnic and took family members with us, including one who was 15 months old, and one who was 82. A great way to get to know one another better in a relaxed atmosphere.
Cory, our resident sommelier, sampling the cheese selection with his grenache
Our littlest rainmaker, Sebastian, enjoying the picnic with Sagar and Nitin
Towards the end of the picnic our families persuaded us to pose together and toast a lovely day
