The right stuff
Andrew D’Souza, the chief operating offi cer at the Canadian success story, off ers expert advice on transforming a two- person start- up into a successful company — and talks about how his company copes with the challenge of fi nding the talent to meet d
Tech writer Gillian Shaw talks to Top Hat COO Andrew D’Souza about the challenge of finding the right people for a growing company.
After sitting through countless university lectures, University of Waterloo grads Mike Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini came up with a more productive way for students to use their smartphones, notebooks and tablet computers than sitting at the back of the class checking Facebook.
Their online learning tool Top Hat, which turns one- way lectures into interactive learning experiences in which professors can pose questions and get instant feedback from their students using their mobile computing devices, was launched in five universities in 2011 and received top marks in the classroom and from venture capitalists who have invested more than $ 9 million US in the company.
Today the two- person startup has grown to an 80- person company headquartered in Toronto, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago and other centres, and Top Hat is in classrooms in more than 300 universities across Canada, the United States and around the world.
Initially, the company found universities reluctant to fund Top Hat for their students and it instituted a model in which students paid $ 20 a semester or $ 38 for two semesters for their entire university career. But Top Hat’s success in increasing classroom attendance, boosting marks and improving student engagement has turned that around and now universities are signing up so all their professors can use Top Hat in their classrooms.
Q With your success and the money you have raised, you have gone from being a two- founder start- up to where you are now. A lot of people who are starting up companies want to know: How do you get from that Point A to Point B?
A I think we’ve done a great job of bringing on board the right people with the right set of experience, the right diversity to build the company. We had an interesting tiff with Groupon. We started to look for sales candidates. We looked at different companies that had the right type of model, people with the right type of experience that were selling to a single decision- maker and could run these high- velocity sales, and we found Groupon was a company where the top sales people fit our model very well. We ended up hiring some of their top performers in a few key markets. They sent us some version of a cease- and- desist ( order). We didn’t really know what to do. We talked to our investors and talked to a few other people and realized it was really just a threat. We sent it to the Wall Street Journal and we ended up getting quite a bit of publicity out of that.
Q So Groupon’s ceaseanddesist gave a real boost to your recruiting efforts?
A It did. The timing just ended up just working out where they had just announced their Q3 20112 earnings and they weren’t very good, and so there were a lot of stories saying Groupon’s stock is tanking and, by the way, their best salespeople are going to this Toronto- based education start- up. It helped. We weren’t really in a position to fight a legal battle with Groupon but we could fight a PR battle.
Q How do you find the talent and are universities here turning out what you need?
A Absolutely. At one point we were at a decision point: Should we move the headquarters of the company to San Francisco or somewhere in the States? And we just realized from a product development and technical perspective, universities in Canada are really world class — you get people who know how to solve hard problems, are excited about working on hard problems and are excited about joining entrepreneurial, fast- growing companies. Finding just a phenomenal group of engineering and product people … ( it) would have been a lot more competitive to put that same team together in the Bay area or somewhere else because there are so many other companies vying for the same calibre of talent.
Q What are some of the challenges in growing a company and recruiting to fill those needs?
A Because the tech ecosystem is younger in Canada, there aren’t as many people who have seen the story before, seen the story multiple times. From an organization scaling, from operations perspective, from a sales and marketing perspective, there just aren’t that many people who have taken a company from five salespeople to 1,000 salespeople or a small marketing budget to a multimilliondollar marketing budget. We have been fortunate enough to be able to slot in a few folks who have seen the story.
Q What are your top three pieces of advice for start- up entrepreneurs?
A The biggest is recognizing your strengths and gaps and being willing and ready to fill out the team, to address those and step into the areas you enjoy or are
better at.
The other is really helping people — if you have somebody you’d like to hire, and it is typically with an executive but almost anybody in the organization, helping them visualize what this company could look like with them as part of it. I think a lot of people, especially if you’ve worked in a big organization, you look at the organization from the outside and say ‘ Is this an organization I want to be part of? Is this a culture that I want to be part of?’ and make that fairly objective decision. Whereas at an early stage or at a growing company or with a very important role, bringing in the right person at the right time actually changes the company.
And then the third, which we hear all the time but always bears repeating: Just be completely relentless and obsessive about hiring the best possible people. When you’ve taken venture financing, when you realize that the market is growing and you need to meet that need, there’s always the temptation to say we’ve got these five roles to fill, let’s just find people to fill them. You can take risks on people but when you know somebody is not necessarily the highest calibre A player and you let that bar slide, it always comes back to bite you. The same way top talent, very good people, attract other top talent, mediocre people repel top talent. It’s better to wait and find the exact right fit because that’s going to accelerate your business significantly, and doing the opposite can really hurt you.