Embarking on a Hearty Journey

Why I'm excited to start this new venture

This week our team is stepping out of stealth mode and announcing the launch of our new company: Hearty. It’s the product of several months of learning, developing and testing, along with lifetimes of personal experience.

Hearty is a business reputation network that individuals and companies can use to find great people to work with. You can find an overview of Hearty at our website and we’re providing early access to a limited group now.

Rule 1 of Startups is that you should only start a company in an area that you are passionate about. The purpose of this post is to share my personal motivations behind Hearty and invite you to share in what we learn and create in this new substack series.

1. Passion for the People Problem

Awhile back our small group decided that we would startup all over when the sale of our previous company was complete. We met weekly to brainstorm, research and prioritize our ideas. Our exploration went all over the map, but we kept coming back to a passion that was top of mind: Our love of building great teams.

“Scaling great teams” became our focus, and we took a step back to think and speak with others about how we’ve been successful—and unsuccessful—in team building. These discussions led to a recurring theme: We immediately go to people we know and trust when we need to find someone to work with.

I personally get at least one message a day from a friend asking me, “Do you know a great ____?” This is so natural we don’t even think about it. We humans rely on a shared, social brain to help us make decisions—whether reading restaurant reviews on Yelp or asking employees to make job referrals. As long as humans have existed we’ve tapped into networks and reputation to quickly find someone we can trust to do business with.

These “brokered” connections can radically change our lives for the better. Remember that your significant other and your best friends were strangers to you until some lucky connection happened. I met my wife in 1993 through a blind date set up by a mutual friend, and my life would be infinitely worse without that lucky introduction!

What if we could help great people connect with more reliability and less serendipity?

People increasingly see the value of introductions in business and life, yet we still operate inefficiently. When in need we must figure out who to reach out to, and which communication medium to try reach them with. When people ask us for recommendations, it becomes a chore added to our to-do list, and we struggle to mentally parse the thousands of connections we’ve come across.

Software offers the promise to drive efficiency and scale in all unmet needs, including in connecting great people. So far all we’ve really got is LinkedIn. But the app has chosen a path of making as many “connections” as possible, and is more into finding new ways to sell our attention rather than actually improving our careers. In our testing we found that when people sit down and review their LinkedIn connections, they claim only 25% are “known well.” That’s why asking people for introductions to their LinkedIn connections is usually met with, “Well, I don’t really know that person.”

I continually see great people in my network passing each other like ships in the night, and a failure to connect greatness leads to so many missed doors of mutual opportunity. The result? Too many bad hiring decisions, struggles to land jobs, and settling on a sub-par partner, investor, supplier, client or consultant.

The role of a startup founder is to uncover customer pain and build a 10x solution for it. Much pain comes from an inability to find great people, and massive good can come from every single successful connection.

2. Working with Comrades

I’m extremely fortunate to have been exposed early on to the magic of working with a high-performing business team. At Procter & Gamble, our new products group combined mutual respect and personal responsibility with a mission to create new, $100 million categories. Through both failure and success our teams worked incredibly well together. In my first entrepreneurial venture as partner of a digital advertising agency, we made culture a competitive advantage, which drove industry-leading growth, profit and a big acquisition.

But our most recent startup, Ahalogy, represented the highest level of teamwork and success. It took the crucible of a near-death—layoffs and pivot—to reforge our band of believers into a high-performance organization. After burning through $10 million and making every mistake in the startup book, we locked arms and united in search of a new path forward. We worked together to find that path, got profitable, started doubling revenue, and our business was acquired for one of the highest multiples in the industry.

In early March 2020, just days after receiving our company sale checks—and also just days before the COVID lock-down—we had a company trip to celebrate in Cancun. Amid toasting, dancing, crying and hugging on the beach together, we shared a peak experience of mutual love that simply does not happen in the lives of 99.9% of work teams.

I went to sleep that n̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ morning knowing that I would be leaving the company in a few weeks. Yet I became determined to spend the rest of my working life trying to get back to moments like that—and help many others do the same.

I’ve never been a soldier, but I’ve heard stories that when bands of brothers and sisters ship home they long to return to their comrades they left behind. I didn’t really understand why people would want to re-enter a risky battle zone just to be with some buddies. I think I understand now: We are hard-wired as humans to deeply value the bonding together for a greater good when under periods of challenge.

The corporate world brings the challenge, but largely fails to create an environment that unlocks this potential for peak teamwork. My story of truly loving co-workers as comrades is unimaginable to most people.

I am working on Hearty because I think we can help many more teams achieve peak experiences like this. And I’m excited to be back with my co-founder, Ryan Watson, and a group of other friends, partners and investors from our personal journeys once again.

3. Now is the Time

Ideas are easy, but the finding the right timing can be hard. Many promising new concepts, from Da Vinci’s helicopter to Apple’s Newton, came before people and supporting systems were ready. I’m passionate about Hearty because it is a timeless idea with a problem that is peaking now.

We increasingly work in a global market, where our customers, suppliers, employees and partners can be anywhere. While this is a vast opportunity, it means that trust is more needed—and at risk—than ever before.

That’s why business people increasingly call this “a warm intro world.” Employers don’t review many of the job applications they receive—there’s just too many in a global marketplace. Investors routinely ignore cold emails, telling entrepreneurs that part of the test for funding is their ability to find an introduction.

This need for more proof of trust is increasing. The rise of remote work means that you don’t even get to meet a job applicant in person before an offer goes out. We’re tapping more fractional workers, part-timers and consultants for knowledge work, but how can we trust they have the required knowledge? Historic trust signals—such as the college you went to, title you last held, or interviewing skills—means much less in a world that is about inventing the future versus replaying the past glories.

Further, now is the time for real progress on Diversity & Inclusion. We have enough evidence that diverse teams are needed for better business results as well as a better functioning society. Employees of all ranks are demanding more than a supportive tweet from their employers. We want real change.

Ironically, the rise of traditional “warm intros” makes it even harder for people in minority groups to break into the networks that people use for vetting people. That’s why a core piece of the Hearty product is to create new ways to identify diverse talent, and better tap our networks to bring this talent to the forefront.

All of this is being accelerated with the upheaval of COVID-19. Companies are being forced to forge new habits and are more open to novel solutions. All of us have experienced a shock to our systems that is forcing personal re-evaluation. Stuck alone on video windows for months, we have a newfound appreciation for, well, being with other people we like. And now that we’ve felt our own mortality a bit more, perhaps we will realize that life is too short and precious to spend our working hours in an organization that doesn’t bring out our best selves.

Meanwhile, we are now the first generation in human history in which a small group of people can create a product that impacts the entire planet for the better. What an amazing opportunity! I mean, if we’re not trying to do this we’re wasting our time!

Are the odds long? Of course! They are microscopic! But the world is telling us there’s a chance.

Ahoy

We’ve barely pushed off the dock with Hearty. It’s incredibly early, the odds are long and the risks are high. We’re excited to correct the mistakes we made last time, but realize that we’re going to make a lot of new mistakes this time. That’s what you sign up for when you set sail on a startup.

But if it was easy, anyone could do it—and I wouldn’t have it any other way. The journey itself is what makes a new venture special, and I’m excited to go after it again with a group of Hearty comrades that have done amazing work together so far.

I’ll use this space to share our learning, decisions and perspective, both from building Hearty and building great teams more generally. I would be honored to include you on the journey if you choose to subscribe.