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Second Time is a Charm: Interview with New Relic CEO Lew Cirne – Part 2
Part 2 of a 4-part InterviewBy Rob Kornblum | Interviews
By Rob Kornblum | Interviews
Part 2 of 4:
The following is Part 2 of a 4 part interview that I did with Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of software powerhouse New Relic, Inc. Lew is a successful serial entrepreneur and New Relic is his second big hit.
Lew Cirne: I want to make sure we cover, there are vast differences between the two companies that I think are related to your work.
Rob Kornblum: Absolutely, I would love to hear what you think those are. And if was company differences or if it was really about experience differences for you as an entrepreneur, or age differences, lifestyle differences.
Lew Cirne: It was very conscious decision, it was very related to where I was at my stage in life, and it’s had impact on culture of the companies and the type of people that are in those companies. So when I started Wily I was 28, I was single. Part of my rationale for doing it was I had raised all the $35,000 of seed capital and that gave me all the comfort in the world that I could quit my day job and live long enough on that to start a company. And that’s a very different consideration if you don’t have a big safety net in place and you do have a family. But being single at Wily, the things I loved to do in life were work on the company and work on the company, and that was it, right?
And I think that we didn’t have a burnout culture but we certainly had a culture where a lot of people were roughly my age and we just worked longer hours. We were peddling faster.
When I started New Relic, and I decided to take venture funding and build a company out of it, I was very I was in a very different stage of my life… I got married, had a daughter. My daughter was nearing her second birthday. In committing to starting a company I also did not want that to be at the expense of a full and complete family life.
Yeah, but the key thing is I was very thoughtful about it from the beginning. So when I started the company before I had a Series A, the kind of ground rules I had was we’re going to look for a more experienced employee base, capable of doing more in a shorter period of time, and is less likely to burn out.
Typically people with 8-10 years [of] experience are at that stage in life where they have two young kids and they’ve got to deal with finding the right pre-school or whatever it is, right, but these experienced people are also capable of being remarkably much more effective with their time. – Lew Cirne
We’re going to have a standard minimum three week vacation policy. We’re going to encourage people to take all of it and not store it up. You know the rationale, a two week vacation policy is crazy in my mind. Because first of all you have to burn one of those two weeks taking time off for stuff that isn’t really vacation, like going to the in-laws, or some other thing that’s not like going away to a remote place and taking two weeks to unplug and recharge, right?
Lew Cirne: You need a three week vacation every year, because I think you ought to be trying to string two weeks together where you are really disconnecting so that you can really recharge.
And the other thing I thoughtfully put into the culture is I make a habit of leaving the office at 5 o’clock every night because one of the important things to me is dinner with the family, and I like to cook the dinner, and it is just a routine I have. Certainly I want it not to be ‘Oh Lew the founder gets away with it’, but it’s a pretty quiet office between 5 and 5:30 at New Relic compared to most other high-growth companies.
Compare that with Square, down the street, much younger company, they have catered dinners, right?
Rob Kornblum: Yes
Lew Cirne: It’s a different message. [They’re] young, talented, but often I feel like they’re putting in more hours but they aren’t necessarily generating more output.
Rob Kornblum: I noticed you called it pedaling faster not necessarily going faster, but pedaling faster.
Lew Cirne: Yes! Right? They probably aren’t pedaling in the right gear. And what happens is you find that your company is attractive to a different kind of person. Typically people with 8-10 years [of] experience are at that stage in life where they have two young kids and they’ve got to deal with finding the right pre-school or whatever it is, right, but these experienced people are also capable of being remarkably much more effective with their time. And so they don’t want to be in the rat race.
Rob Kornblum: So Lew I have a couple of follow up questions to that cause this is really important. This is a big part and thread of the book.
One is culturally, how you both hired for and reinforced that efficiency part of what you’re looking for. People who can be really efficient and how you manage for it in the course of running the business.
Lew Cirne: Well, we set very high goals and we have very aggressive objectives on every part of the business. So, we are not a lifestyle company or someplace where work is just easy. But we are also we try to really resist the urge to press the panic button and get people to go into overdrive. That should be an occasional thing. The week before we have a big product launch, you know, we might ask people to work some time over the weekend, but that’s like a rare exception.
I, for example, don’t call my direct reports or people in the company over the weekend. Or if I do have to talk to someone in the evening, I open up the call with an apology and check in if they’ve got obligations with the family or something like that.
But it’s a rare thing, so it’s part of me setting the tone that ‘hey, I’m respectful of the fact that you’ve got family time and things like that and you know I’m expecting you to put all you’ve got into the company when you’re at the company but I also want you to have a full life and that includes life outside of the company.’
And hopefully that filters through. I think it does filter through just by the example that I and the other senior team sets.
Rob Kornblum: And when you went to hire the senior team, how did you try to look for folks that shared that value, and also ways in which you try to reinforce it beyond the interactions you have?
Lew Cirne: You know, many of the early senior team where people I worked with at Wily that were in the same stage of life now and you know earlier on were also able to work longer hours when they were younger. So it was an easy thing to convey to them. I talked about it in interviews, and you can tell by body language like if people lean forward and get excited about it or if they just politely nod and say ‘Oh that’s nice.’
Basically my companies have always benefitted from just having mutual attraction to the right people and people who line up with us on core values, get excited about the company. We get excited about them, and then largely the recruiting process is how you talk about it, and the example you set as CEO goes an awful long way.
Once in a while, everybody kind of has received that email over the weekend that says like, really irks you, gets on your nerves, and now your head is back in the office, “Did you really have to bug me with this deliverable on a Saturday?”, that kind of thing. If it’s not urgent, if it can wait till next week or wait for a personal conversation when we’ve got time to meet on Monday.
So, if you kind of reinforce that message and think about this: whatever we lose short-term by that lost productivity of all those extra hours, we’re going to gain on retention, lower attrition, and on people not burning out. And just reminding people that it’s important, and it’s so differentiated from the rest of Silicon Valley in my opinion, at least Silicon Valley growth companies.