Ep. 2 Mike Fitzsimmons Co-founder & CEO of Crosschq

Show Notes

Crosschq is pioneering Human Intelligence Hiring™ by harnessing the power of people to help companies better screen, onboard and source the best talent. Crosschq’s technology gathers direct insights from people, for people and transforms those insights into powerfully predictive data that helps ensure a great job match between talent and a company. The company’s cloud-based SaaS solutions were built to ensure a fully transparent candidate experience while minimizing bias and protecting privacy. Founded in 2018, Crosschq is backed by GGV, Bessemer Ventures, Slack, Tiger Global, Rocketship, SAP and other well-known Silicon Valley Investors.

To learn more, visit crosschq.com.

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Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show today. I'm excited. We have Mike Fitzsimmons, he's the co-founder and CEO of cross-check. He's got a really interesting kind of background in the recruitment space and what they're doing at cross-check. I'm curious to know what you guys think and what you're looking forward to in today's interview, John and Greg,

Jon Larson: I'm really interested in doc and the product that they're developing and the, and I think they've identified and really interesting job to do that. A lot of people are a lot of people in business have been looking for a long time, and that is major pain point and that's recruitment and getting the right employees.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah, I think this is going to be pretty fascinating too, just seeing what he's learned along the way and how that informed, why he created this company, because just our own woes over the years, and trying to recruit people, it's a hard task and, people are difficult at times even, and kind of, it's hard to know what you're going to get and sometimes wonderful things happen sometimes not so wonderful, but his experiences around that and understanding people and or not, and how that informed what he's created is going to be really interesting to see.

Kevin Horek: Welcome back to the learner.co show. Today we have Mike Fitzsimmons, he's the co-founder and CEO of cross-check Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Often to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Horek: Yeah. I'm really excited to have you on the show. We've talked before, and I think what you guys are doing at crosscheck is really innovative and cool and very much needed in this space. Maybe before we get into that, let's get to know you better and start off with where you grew up.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, I, I, not a one town answer for me. I was a son of immigrant parents, and I was actually born in Nashville, Tennessee and spent the most time in my early years in outside of Boston mass, and then Richmond, Virginia. East coast basically, but a number of different stops.

Kevin Horek: Very cool. What did you take in university and why?

Mike Fitzsimmons: I studied economics? I studied economics. I actually went to college to play sports and I went to a liberal arts school and it was the closest thing I could get to something that resembled a business major. It was the best I could do based off the options that I had in front of.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. You've done a ton of stuff and worked for a bunch of different companies. Do you maybe want to give us a bit of background on your journey with some learnings along the way?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's been quite a journey. I, I started my career actually in a large enterprise. It was a company called circuit city, which at the time was the dominant consumer electronics retailer in the U S a $12 billion revenue company. I was very fortunate in that experience to be part of a new business unit. I was on the front lines of launching new companies within circuit city, and this was kind of right out of college. It was very cool, starting point little known fact, but CarMax, which is a very large successful car retailer in the U S was actually a circuit city company that we started. Circuit city is no longer in the world, but CarMax is still a dominant player. That's an interesting learning there in terms of innovation, but for sure, that's where I started. That's where I got a lot of the early lessons of incubating and incubating startups within a big organization.

Mike Fitzsimmons: I set out for Silicon valley and started my journey with true startups if you will. Now we're dating, it's probably 20 years ago.

Kevin Horek: What made you actually make the leap from corporate America into doing?

Mike Fitzsimmons: I think part of it was the personal journey. I was circuit city was headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. I probably felt although the opportunity seemed to seem large. I knew there was a lot more out there. That coupled with actual professional opportunities. I actually got, took a job opportunity with an e-commerce startup out in San Francisco. That was really the catalyst for the move.

Kevin Horek: You didn't just jump into starting your own company. You went and worked at a startup to begin with, correct?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, exactly. And it was interesting. It probably took me about three months to realize that wonderful experience I got early in my career at a fortune 500 large company, both just from a corporate protocol and process. How are things done in a large organization? What's so beneficial and valuable, probably three months in where I realized, gosh, all of that experience was great and I can do this, I'm built for this and this is I probably got my see lights. Got my confidence.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Did you try to bring some of your lessons that you learned in circuit city into the startup to make their processes and businesses better?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Well, it was all to just knowledge of the business. It was a very Silicon valley thing at the time where people were starting companies in general categories that they thought were going to be successful, but didn't necessarily have deep domain experience in those categories. The company that I joined was actually a company called warranty now and warranty now is trying to enable the sale of online extended service plan, as attachments to buying consumer electronics products. The reason that I was uniquely qualified to come in and run product for this company is because that was the largest driver at circuit city. Believe it or not circuit city was a 12 billion revenue company, but 650 million of it wasn't extended warranty fails. All of them, all of the profit in the business came from those extended warranty. Yeah. There was no margin in selling DVD players.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It was all about selling the extended warranty. Full-stop non-negotiable, the company would not have been profitable without it. It was for sure, I had leverage and experience to bring to the table on just that experience and the ability to kind of share my expertise of knowing how it actually worked with him, at that time, the largest, most successful player in the space. That was beneficial, but I'm not sure that there was business lessons. I think a lot of the startups stuff you do have to kind of learn on the fly, right? You have to learn how to do a hundred different jobs. You have to learn how to kind of be resourceful in a different way than you do in a larger enterprise. So it's probably a combination of two.

Kevin Horek: Sure. Do you maybe want to talk about some of the skills that you've learned the hard way along the way as you've been building your own companies?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Well, for sure fundraising is one, I think that was, I remember the first VC meeting that once I started at this company warrants, and I remember it like it was yesterday. I didn't even know what a VC was. I probably couldn't have spelled, it could have spelled a V2 at the time, but I remember they brought me to the meeting to be the subject matter expert. I remember that like figuring out that motion, it's certainly something that you learn through experience. Right. Those of us that have started companies and kind of raised capital, we probably all remember the first meeting we had and the second meeting we had and the 10th meeting we had until we kind of figured out, how to get the pitch, right. How to make sure we're focusing on the right things and how we understand what the venture investor is really looking for.

Mike Fitzsimmons: That's very different than a lot of the motions that we kind of take to our everyday life, right. Our everyday life where we're trying to drive incremental improvement on things, that you don't want to tell an incremental story to any venture investor, right. You want to, you want to tell a story about category creation and big markets and things of that nature. That for sure, to time and to grind and took a lot of nos along the way before I started to figure out those motions. That, that I would definitely highlight as something that I don't think anybody gets that right on the first at bat,

Kevin Horek: You were learning how to pitch and talk to investors and I've heard different sides of people trying to pitch to their ideal VCs, maybe at the beginning, or they leave them to the end. What do you think, and what are your thoughts around actually curating your list of people to pitch to?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, and I, I think that the phase one in your journey of capital raising is different than phase three or four. I, I think I'm in kind of the phase three or four now where I have a reputation. I know people in the category and I, I, it's different where you can afford to be more selective and more focused and more intentional terms of the investors that you want to work with. I think that you have to earn that. I think you have to earn that right a bit, and I know it's changing and I know we're getting, there's so many funds now and so much access to capital and more entrepreneurs are getting funded earlier in their company's journey. I would say in my early days, man, I would, you just take any meeting you can get, it's nice to be intentional. It's nice to be the perfect Y Combinator.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It goes to, Sequoia does your or whatever it is, but the reality is that's not right. That's, that's not every company. I was more in the zone of having to do every one of those, angel pitch meetings, or just networking the hell out of it. Just any way I could get an at bat with a potential investor, I would take. And, and the irony of all of that though, is it's a funny story. I will never forget two companies that go from me. We had, we had a pretty successful campaign that took place. It was in the e-commerce space and we got into the wall street journal and they did a whole piece on it. A VC reached out to me and I never heard of the fund. I said, yeah, I'll take the meeting. I was kind of just downtrodden at the time. I didn't, I had never heard of the fund.

Mike Fitzsimmons: I'd never heard of the guy. I just not very optimistic about it. And it came to meet with me. I remember when he reached back out, said he wanted to lead our series a, he said, it's because you acted like you didn't want me, like you were so dismissive. I didn't even know that was happening. Right. I just having a day, we all have days, right. I was having a bad day and it came through, but weirdly it weirdly out. The other investor that came in that round, ironically, I was, we started this business and I was on Kearney street in San Francisco. We took the full fourth floor of this building. And there was four companies in it. I remember I was there late one night as I was not that late as seven o'clock and a guy comes up the elevator and he was looking for someone else who wasn't there.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It was a CEO of another startup that was sharing the space with me. This guy had stuck on a plane. His plane was late coming in from LA. I said, gentleman's name was Chris had called him and said, Hey, Chris, what do you do? And he's like, I'm a venture investor. I said, would you want to go grab dinner? The key and I went and grabbed dinner, but again, wasn't even coming to see me. He was coming to see this other guy and he ended up being the co-investor in our series day. So anyway, not always right. You just never know.

Kevin Horek: Just want to step back for a second. What actually made you take the leap and do your own.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an idea for sure. Right. I, I definitely was not an entrepreneur that just said, Hey, I want to start something. What am I going to start? That was, it never has been my approach. My approach has definitely been more purpose driven around a specific idea that I've identified. That's the first piece is just identifying what I think is a big idea. The second piece is I've just always felt like I could do it. There is a, there a part of confidence. I think if you're confident enough and you're, you understand the space enough and can gather the resources to kind of get a product to market, you've got a shot. That idea, plus the confidence in yourself to go make it happen. I think you have to have those two things and to have a shot.

Kevin Horek: Sure. I'm curious. What made you come up with the idea for crosscheck and what exactly is it?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. And this was a super personal one. I, and I'll just to again, show you how the arc of things. Isn't always a straight line. My co-founder and I, Pete getting there and Pete has been a very successful entrepreneur and investor during his career. Pete took his first company that he started public on that deck out of business school, which was an e-learning SAS company. Pete was actually the VC at worldview ventures who read the wall street journal article and investor this my company. Just to show you how this stuff goes, but together it's pretty amazing, but he and I worked together for about a decade on that business. And, we realized during that journey concurrently realized some of the challenges that come along with trying to hire and make it hiring decisions. After we sold that business, he and I got together about two years later, I was running another company at the time and Pete approached me to get a coffee so we could grab a coffee and catch up.

Mike Fitzsimmons: We hadn't talked in a while and he said, let's go start a seed fund. Let's go, partner together and go start a small, twenty-five $50 million fund and look at early stage investments. I said, what, Pete, we still have to solve this thing. It's bad hire thing. Like I said, then went back and both reminisced about the challenges associated with making great hiring decisions. That was the, when the fire started burning again and I went to work and started putting together a more meaningful business plan, really trying to solve the problem of helping the company make better hires, full stop. He and I, then he started getting more fired up about it. Before you knew it, were co-founding crosscheck and off to the races after the races went. Again, I'll reiterate the non linear approach to many of these things. Now that is what crosscheck is doing.

Mike Fitzsimmons: If you look at hiring data, it's rough, it's an industry that hits all of our companies are and still isn't great. 45% of new hires. Don't make it 18 months in their new job. Despite all of the tools that we have and all of the things that we're trying to do, we're still not getting it right. That's what crosscheck is trying to do is bring more data to the hiring process that helped give companies and talent access to more tools to ensure that, they are well-matched and set them up for long-term success. That, that at a highest level, what we are doing, and we're off to a pretty good start with, we're excited about where things are.

Kevin Horek: Obviously it's a bit of a mission driven approach to building and starting a company. How are you guys solving that problem? Because it's pretty challenging.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It's really challenging. I think just to further emphasize that the reason we think it's such a big idea and a big opportunity is just how massive it is. We know the problems as companies, when we make poor hiring decisions, we know how they impact culture. We know how much it impacts productivity. We know how expensive it is to find a replacement and train that replacement. We also think about the impact on talent and just how awful it is for people when they take the wrong job. Like we're all aware this is a hundred billion dollar plus problem. If you could make a 1% incremental impact on that big problem, you can have a meaningful impact on the world. So that part is really clear. The way we do that is through data. I mean, what we have learned is that this industry has been flying blind for way too long.

Mike Fitzsimmons: When I say flying blind, they just haven't been equipped talent leaders. Haven't been equipped with the right tools to help them actually have the normal data you would have in any other business functions to measure their success or failure. The first thing that cross-check does is we come in and we help companies get organized around a quality of hire metrics. How do you actually understand and analyze the quality of your hiring decisions to ultimately help you become better hires? And that's, that includes two things. We have our, we call us the talent intelligence cloud. We connect to your pre hire data with your post hire business outcome data in the cloud, and connect that in a way that can be analyzed to help you understand what are predictors of success in your company, and ultimately translate those into how you make hiring decisions, because you've got to figure out where you are, you got to get your benchmarks established.

Mike Fitzsimmons: You got to understand for your organization, right? Th those types of data points. We do all kinds of cool things to help you optimize those decisions, but it's all based in data, and it's all based in connecting the pre hire candidates intelligence with post-hire business outcome. That's, that's what it ultimately comes down to.

Kevin Horek: Okay. Obviously, as I hire people in con that come and go through my company, the data gets better and then it can help me in the longterm, or how does that kind of work using cross-check on an ongoing basis?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, exactly. I mean, that's the idea. And, and let me give you a couple of radical insights and some real data and real customers, and you can kind of put it into context and some of this might surprise you. Some of it might not surprise you, but I'll give you one specific unique instance. We have a large enterprise customer, 20,000 employees, they hire about 5,000 people a year, and we just kind of completed the phase, one of their benchmarking for their quality of hire analytics. One of the things that were able to determine as if they only had a 9% correlation to their interview scores, to ultimately the quality of the hire, let's take a second on that. We all, we all do interviews, and then we score those interviews, those go into an applicant tracking system, and that's ultimately part of how we have to interview teams and we make hiring decisions only a 9% correlation to how they score their interviews and how good that person turned out to be.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Wow. Right. You're saying to yourself, okay, what do I do with that data? Well, there's a couple of things you do. You can then go a layer deeper and look at who was on those interview teams. Are there certain people that tend to be really good predictors of talent and are those that maybe aren't as good that we need to develop more, but certainly those great predictors of talent, I want to put them on more interview panels, right. That thing, but it also impacts how do we make decisions? If we start to process that data and we're like, it's only 9% correlative, then the conversation gets pretty interesting that, Hey, we should be looking at other things. We shouldn't be, we know that some people interview well and some people just don't interview as well. Historically it has been one of the primary tools we make that we use to make decisions.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Now we've proven through data that for this particular organization, it's just simply not effective. We got to think about other ways that we can make these decisions. So that's just a good example. I think it shows how much bias there is in our processes too. There's all these challenges that we just believe until you get data into the system. You're just not going to be fully equipped to make great decisions.

Kevin Horek: You have this candidate assessment and reference check. Do you want to talk about that? Because I think that's actually a really interesting and fascinating part of your business.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. I love it. That, that once you kind of have the data, then the question is how do I optimize? One of the ways that we think you can get better, we've rolled out a product called our crosscheck 360 and our crosscheck 360 is really a modernized version of a reference checking tool. What we do with the cross-check 360, as we do what we call a self or have candidates do what we call a self reference, which is an eight minute online survey, if you will, where you're answering questions of how you view yourself upon different dimensions, interpersonal dimension, skills, dimensions, things of that nature. We go out and combine that with feedback from people you have worked with in the past peers, managers, coworkers, mentors, whatever it is to really give this 360 view on who you are and what it's like to work with you, and what are the things that you're great at and what are the things that you're maybe not as great at, but Hey, we, as a hiring company could develop you to be great at.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It really, we called it human intelligence and it's this idea of all right. We can all create great resumes and, but maybe we didn't go to Harvard and then we didn't work at Google, but those who have worked with us know that we are absolute rock stars, but they're how do we get that data into the hiring decision, right. How do we get that data into the process? And that's what the 360 is. It's kind of bringing that layer of human intelligence, real, what is it like, what is Mike like to work with? Kind of stuff and getting that into the flow. We can use that as part of our calculus. That's the idea.

Kevin Horek: Once I'm in the system, as an employee, the company monitors, how long I stay, how well I'm doing and that kind of thing, but what happens when I choose to leave the company? Do I still have a profile on cross-check that I can leverage for my next gig? Or what types of people I hire before I'm starting my own company? Or how does that work?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, for sure. There's a, we have a concept called the locker. Every candidate that works with cross-check that the talent themselves, they create a cross-check locker, that locker is fully portable. You can take that with you from one opportunity to another it's especially good for like gig workers who are just by the nature of their engagements are working 90 days at a pop or whatever it is. We're also looking to expand that locker. We have a view that things like your performance reviews and things of that nature, that historically, you leave a company and go to the next, those don't necessarily go with you unless you find a way to bundle them together. And it's kind of a broken process. So we're doing some cool things. Our roadmap with that locker, where we think there's an opportunity to have kind of a verified version of your LinkedIn that has your real stuff.

Mike Fitzsimmons: If you will, that you can travel with you and take with you from opportunity to opportunity. So portability, we think is really important.

Kevin Horek: I'm curious to know what other advice or findings have you learned along the way hiring people, because you mentioned a little while ago, a lot of startups fail just because they don't hire the right people.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. We've been doing a ton of hard work too, around evolving our Crosstrek 360 product. It does a better job of getting even more focused on specific cultural company stage dimensions. And that's an important thing. I mean, we know in our own hiring, right, there's a, in a company of up to a hundred employees, there's a certain mindset and a certain type of person who's going to do better. That person might not do as well as they had a company of a hundred thousand employees. Right. That's just the reality of it. That's not always the case, but for certain cultures or company culture fit for sure is the case. I think you got to just get really honest about what drives and creates success at your organization. I think that is part that companies probably aren't, as self-aware, as we like to think we are, we like to think of ourselves upon certain dimensions, but until you start looking at the data, do you really understand what are the things that they're going to be predictive of success at your organization?

Mike Fitzsimmons: I think that it's just really important. I think the company as company leaders ourselves, we just have to be in touch with that, like really authentically in touch, not what we kind of wrote down on our, mission and values statement, but really in terms of what is, predictor of success, our organizations, and then we gotta manage that.

Kevin Horek: No, that makes a lot of sense. I'm curious then if I apply to a company and it looks like I'm an okay candidate, for example, could you, or are you currently doing where you'd maybe recommend me to another company that would be a better fit at or something like that?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, I know. And we're doing some cool things. I mean, we're, we've recently rolled out a product called crosscheck recruit and the phase one of crosscheck recruit was actually creating job opportunities for those in your network. So, so you, as a candidate are applying for a job at one of our companies, and you have given as part of your references, six of your former coworkers and managers at the end of that process, we do make an invitation to those folks to say, Hey, are you also interested in a job at XYZ company? They opt in and say, yes, I am. We have this really cool thing developing. It's a viral referral network, but it's done pre hire, not post hire. Like we've all seen employee referral networks forever. We are creating these talent pools and companies are jumping on them and they're making great high quality hires out of them.

Mike Fitzsimmons: There's a, there's the idea here that if you're a great quality and we're about to hire you, it's, there's a fairly reasonable likelihood that the people that are your references are all going to be high quality. We are doing some cool things to kind of create talent pools for our companies as well, and open up job opportunities for folks that are looking for them.

Kevin Horek: Sure. How does a person figure out what type of employee they are?

Mike Fitzsimmons: It's just as many different data signals as we can get on both sides, both pre hire and post-fire is what we're trying to get. On the pre hire side, I mean, I, as I mentioned already, we're getting stuff like, who was your interviewer? Who was your recruiter? What was the source of your hire and everything else we're getting there? Where did you go to school? What were your skills? You can just imagine what that ontology looks like, kind of pre hire in terms of all that different data. Obviously you're crosscheck 360, what are your interpersonal skills? Like, what are your, what are you like to work with? What's your personality traits, all that stuff. We're getting all of that into the cloud, but then the post hire side is where I think there's man, a tremendous amount of innovation to be done. It's not just as straight line as how long did you last and what kind of performer were you?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Those are the traditional things that we would look at, but we want to look at things like how engaged are you or your culture add? We're getting data now on the engagement side, it could be, Hey, after you joined, how many black communities did you engage in, do you show up on time for our all hands, you stay for the whole time on our all hands, but these might seem like crazy things, but this data is accessible, right? And it wasn't accessible in the past. Our ability to judge or to draw conclusions around things like engagement in addition to performance and ambition to tenure is also a pretty cool reality of where we are right now. That's just, we're just getting started on that. I mean, we're working on the ability to suck in data around. Think about it in Salesforce. We can tell how long did it take you to achieve quota, right?

Mike Fitzsimmons: How long did it take you to get your first deal done as a seller? You think about the fail rate with sales hires, man, that is off the charts. If we can kind of help get more predictive on, who's gonna close deals, more quickly, you get up to being a revenue producer more rapidly and that thing, we can have a profound impact. There's just so many cool things happening on that side in terms of getting that post, hire data into the system. That's just a, long-winded answer to your question, but if you kind of think about how all those pieces ultimately connect, and if we get it right, then we can start to draw those inferences and those correlations for our companies to help them understand who's going to ultimately be a great producer. That's the star that they're looking for.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. Obviously you could create a rockstar type profile that as I'm getting new candidates to maybe recognize this person as a potential rockstar, and if they'll fit into your organization, is that fair to say?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, exactly. Even, I mean, I'll tell you some other cool extensions that we've been working on. We have a new product that we're rolling out, which we call early started to action. One of the things that we have learned is that in this new world order with remote hiring, we're making these great hires of people that we think are stars, but we're kind of losing touch with them just because of the remote nature of work. Lots of companies are seeing really high regrettable attrition earlier than they would have typically like quick quit and, less than 90 days, if the person that we hired that we thought was awesome has gone. That's a function of there being so much job opportunity, but that's also a function of us as company leaders, not being on top of it. We've rolled out this tool that does early start detection.

Mike Fitzsimmons: That is basically because we're getting this quick post hire data on how they're performing. We can just identify to the manager and say, Hey Mike's doing great. This was a 31, but all the signal is that he's performing well. He's highly engaged. Let's make absolutely certain that you're on top of it, right? That you're from an L and D even from a comp perspective that you're making sure he psych and fired up. We're, we are, we do see some really cool opportunities there to help as well, just detecting talent, detecting stars after we've hired them and making certain that we're doing everything in our power to retain them because this job market is crazy, as we all know, and you can kind of step out your door and find a new opportunity without too much.

Kevin Horek: I'm assuming that you've seen companies that are allowing their employees the most flexibility, whether that's they want to work on in an office, full-time work from home or a bit of both, or maybe some other perks that they can kind of have those demands these days. If employers don't really allow that to happen, they might not get as good of talent. Or what are your thoughts around that?

Mike Fitzsimmons: I think, I think it's increasingly complex in terms of the balance and the relationship between companies and talent. I think we all just have to do challenge ourselves to do the best job of making sure they're well-matched right day one, before we, even before we even make the hiring decision. Once we've made the hiring decision and we believe they're well matched, it's really, it's kind of our moral obligation to make sure that we're creating an environment that works for both sides. I do think the stakes are just higher, right? It's easier for talent to move. Mobility is on the rise and it should pressure all of us to do better. To make sure that we're intentional in terms of how we're creating development plans for our talent, right? That we're intentional about how we're onboarding them and getting to know them. Crosscheck has another product called crosscheck connect is kind of a human onboarding product where that we created in order to, especially in a remote world, help get to know our talent quicker.

Mike Fitzsimmons: So we've already got the crosscheck 360. Once you've accepted the job, we have another survey. We can activate that will go out to the candidate and say, Hey Mike, before you start, we want to get to know you better. Through asking questions like everything from, how do you like to communicate? Are you a morning person? How do you like to get feedback? How do I earn a gold star with you? What kind of food do you like kind of movies? Do you like whatever it is. We have this whole idea that if we can make this a much more human process on the onboarding, especially again, in a remote environment and get to know you quicker, the things that maybe we used to talk about at the water cooler, or when we'd go grab lunch together. Cause I saw you in the hallway, like all that kind of stuff that's now gone.

Mike Fitzsimmons: We think we can also help on that front too, just to make that initial transition that much smoother.

Kevin Horek: No, that's really cool. I'm curious because you've launched a bunch of companies from the ground up and you're building companies and you guys just raised $30 million that, and you've done a bunch of things that I think a lot of people are trying to do with their startup. What advice do you give people when they're in those early days and they're grinding before they maybe start to see their first customers or when they actually start to grow and raise some money?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. I, I think that, I think it is important before you start or when you start, there's two things that I think are critical that to check the box on and they're team and Tam and I'm a broken record on that. I think as a, if you've got the right team and you've got a large enough cam, then it's worth fighting for, right. Before you start the fight, let's make sure that a you're qualified to be in the fight and B it's a big enough fight worth winning, right? Like that, those are pretty important. I think table stakes again, before you get going. I think once you get going with that at your back, and if you're right, that it's a big enough Tam and then it just is about perseverance. I told that story earlier about the series a and my first company. None of that makes sense.

Mike Fitzsimmons: None of that's a straight line, right? None of that, probably. It's not, again, it's not your, I, I was selected for Y Combinator graduated in quail led my head. Right. That's not that wasn't, that's not necessarily always the path, but that's a wonderful path for sure. I think that perseverance piece is it took the absolute and if you're, you just have to be tough, you have to grind, you have to, you just have to do those things. I, I, I think about the Gardner hype cycle. Right. I always kind of, I always kinda kind of look back and I have it on my wall in my office. Right. Just to always think back to just those key moments in your, and it's built more around emerging technologies and how that works. I also think it's a really good representation in terms of the human emotion on your journey, where you get all excited and we're all fired up and we're going to launch a company.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It gets really, really hard. Right. It just tipped chip back up the train. It's almost like a roller coaster analogy, right. It's just, that's just the reality of what it's going to be and it's going to be like that for a fairly long time. I think that's just an important thing of being extraordinarily self-aware, it's going to take seven to eight years for your company to ever, to create liquidity in all likelihood, right. If that's what you're after and just be extraordinarily aware that the journey is going to be long, but back to that, if you've got the team and we've got a 10, but big enough it's worth doing, and if it's worth doing, then you just have to persevere, right. And just grind your way through.

Kevin Horek: Are there any books or podcasts or courses or something that you'd recommend to people that have guided your journey along the way?

Mike Fitzsimmons: No, it's like, and I'm a part of that is that I'm just a big reader in term or learner, I should say better. I'm not a great reader, but I do my best, but I, in terms of books, I always that guy, Kawasaki book art of the start was one that for me early on, which is like, okay, that's a good crash course. There's another good one. That was a Maynard Webb book who was a, a pretty well-known VC called dear founder that I thought was pretty good. And then more tactically. This was, this was my first sheer SAS company that I started. There was a book by Bruce Cleveland called traversing the traction gap that was literally like a, how to play by play on B2B cash. I, I carry that thing around like a Bible literally. I would have all the pages mark, it looked like I'm like a 10 year old kid with his favorite, comic book kind of thing.

Mike Fitzsimmons: I would just take her with me everywhere. That was even at my current stage. There are resources out there's so many of them, I think you can never go wrong. Those are some that I like, I think in terms of podcasts I've recently, and I don't know how it took me so long to get on this. I recently have been kind of locked in on Reid Hoffman's masters of scale podcast, big it, and it's just really a good one. I also, Glen Solomon is one of my VPs has a good one, a smaller one founder of real talk. I think it's actually worthwhile when I'd recommend the folks, you kind of covered the gamut upstage and company type of Glenn's really good and really good at those things. Those are some that I lean on, but it's similarly we're in such a sharing economy now that I get stuff coming in all the time, but I love, I'm sure you do too.

Mike Fitzsimmons: It's a long list.

Kevin Horek: There anything that you've learned outside of business that you've found helpful in your current ventures or in the past?

Mike Fitzsimmons: No, there's one thing for sure. I think in my co-founder Pete is great with this, but I do think just generally optimism is an extraordinarily important trait. If you're doing this, it's like you really just, if you're, there's, the fear is a good thing and we're all fearful and you can't be in this game unless you're fearful, but I think you have to be also optimistic. I think you have to find that in you and make sure you're channeling that the right way. Just like in all of our normal, our daily lives. Right. I do think it's an important thing to remember too, and to keep it all into perspective and getting that balance and just, we're doing this hopefully for the right reasons and just maintaining that level of optimism. For me, that's certainly something in terms of my personal life that I, that plays on both sides.

Mike Fitzsimmons: The other one is just how you treat people, it's just, again, it's like your normal, how do you treat people in a restaurant? How do you treat people at home? How do you treat those? You care about how do you treat those? You don't even know well, right. I think you gotta do all that stuff. Right. That obviously naturally flows into how you treat the people you work with and the customers, your partners, and your investors. I think the optimistic two people great, and persevere, those are the three for me.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. You keep talking about perseverance and it's come up a few times in the conversation. How have you gotten through the low points and push through and continue going? Because it can be very easy to quit, especially when it's your own, your hundredth low point of the year.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. It's yeah, it's funny. There, there are, I think earlier in my career with the book, is it too big to fail? I think, or whatever that is. I think, I think I, I, I, it's funny. I think early in my career, I was too dumb to fail. Like I literally just didn't know any different, right. I just didn't see any other alternative, but to keep fighting through. It was easier cause I had more energy and I was, it was natural to me just to fight through. And, and frankly, I probably wasn't as good with early signal detection. I'm thinking if that aren't working. I think my mantra has changed now where I'd rather fail fast right. Than fight through things that maybe aren't, and that's part I'm getting better at, for sure. It's failing fast, whether that's a feature, whether that's a vertical we're going after, whatever that is.

Mike Fitzsimmons: I think that's a good learning. I, I also think, at some level when were going into the pandemic, I laughed to myself. I said to one of our investors, I was like, we're too small to fail. Cause the guy I'm so glad we're not in a position where we're, 500 people doing a hundred million revenue, but maybe losing, burning 20 million a year. We've got 10 million on our balance sheet, which maybe would have been financeable pre pandemic. Now it's very challenging because were nimble enough to be able to move right. And react quickly. I do think that there's also just that situational awareness and it, and just being very, very disciplined and we're getting better. I'm getting better at that. That's for sure, helping to kind of fight the fight is doing it in a more calculated fashion. And, and, it's, I'm just kind of being more disciplined and more rigid in that approach.

Kevin Horek: How have n when to pivot or fail fast? Because I think that can be really hard sometimes. Especially if it's your first startup and you're grinding, you don't know how things are going to go. Are there any signs or anything or any examples you could give us of things to maybe look out for?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. It's, it's a, I mean, look, I know it's an old cliche, but this idea of matching mission with metrics right. And everything that we do. I think you're never too early to start at least having some directional data right. To pay attention to and to focus on. So, and if you do that right from the jump and we are crazy about it here at check. Like we have, we are, we track it all because we're all in signal detection. I think it's early signal detection. Make sure that what you're doing, you understand what output you're trying to achieve and make sure you're measuring it and then looking at that signal and interpreting that signal. I think that's for me, how I have to do it, you have to give it enough time to breathe and you have to kind of be smart enough to not run away too quickly, but you also have to make sure you're being honest with yourself about what you're seeing.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Right. We've already, we've experienced that in the, in crosscheck, we had, I'll give you an example of this. We had a, when we first came out, one of the big things that VCs wanted us to do is really nailed this concept of back channel and, doing like secondary references on people. We built out a pretty elaborate plan and our version one product that was like building reference grafts on you and going out and scraping all this stuff. We could find your brothers, sisters, mothers, dog. Right. If that dog knew something about you, we can get that feedback. We quickly realized that, although people like to talk about it, no one was using it at all. Right. That was, we could have double down there cause it's a fun one to talk about for sure. People intellectually like the concept of it, but users just weren't touching it.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Were able to get away from that quickly. Anyway, there's just those things of just being aware of them. And, and regardless of how excited you are about the feature about the module, it's just be aware, pay attention to that signal, data, pay attention to it, honor it, treat it like gold and then move quickly to react.

Kevin Horek: Interesting. That's the one thing I always found interesting about startups is how even in a year or two, how different your company is from your original vision. You've been at crosscheck for a number of years now, how has it kind of evolved other than the example that you just gave?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. I, I love, I mean, one of our investors is flack, right? You look at flax and story, right. They started as, making video games, right. Before, it, they found that they had this unbelievable communication after they had traded for their internal use and now slack is born. They're there, we're not anywhere near in terms of that level of pivot, if you will. I think for sure, what we have learned is that the closed loop side of this equation is wide open to this idea of connecting the post higher outcomes, right. With all the pre higher intelligence is really what this industry is going to take. We, we always kind of knew that coming in. We probably didn't realize just how important that ultimately was gonna, was going to be. Are doubling down on our new hire analytics. Those modules is definitely taking a disproportionate amount of our resources than what we had initially anticipated.

Mike Fitzsimmons: That was a, that's definitely a part of the evolution of our platform. It was just more into the data, more into the analytics.

Kevin Horek: Sure. No, that's actually really interesting. It's cool that somebody like yourself, that's been down this road a few times, been through the startups and been very successful in the past is still open and willing to talk about pivoting still. Right. I always find that like that to me was one of the most eye-opening things that I probably learned in my early thirties that I didn't, it didn't ever Dawn on me. It's like, look, people that have been successful still fail. They still pivot. They still don't get it right out of the gate. I don't know if you ever do like, and obviously you agree with that.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. Cause you don't control, that a lot of stuff happens. I'm not saying in our world the competitive landscape changes, right. Behavior changes. Look at the book, look at, COVID look at how it just changed. You know? So just stuff changes and that's okay. Right. I think back to that team in Tam, as long as you're rooted from an addressable market in something that's big enough and that, it's kind of in motion, right. And, and you're nimble enough and can react quickly enough. You're gonna put yourself in a good spot. I think it's, I think it's when you aren't able to react that quickly. When you chose a Tam, that's too small, that's when you really get yourself into trouble, right. It's like you have a niche product in a small market and it just changed on you too quickly and you couldn't keep up right.

Mike Fitzsimmons: You're kind of dead in the water and you're in trouble. If you're in a big enough market and you're able to react quickly and paying enough attention to the signals, you should be able to figure it out.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice. You decided to build cross-check because you've worked at companies and realized that there was a need in the recruitment space. You actually came up, thought of a problem, came up with solution and decided to actually go for it. What advice do you give to people they're looking to do the same thing? How do they figure out an idea? How do they decide that they should be the one to solve that? Because it's sometimes, it dawns on you that this is a real problem. Maybe I should solve that. Should I let somebody else solve that? How do you kind of give advice to people to come up with their own ideas or how to come up with a startup idea?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, I think it's that, I go back to that the Gardner curve, as you said, is so interesting, but it's like on your evolution of your idea. Yeah. You start by, you're like, okay, I think this is a problem. Cause I experienced it right. Or something like some version of that, right. When you're first identify the opportunity and then you start poking around and you're like, it's really a problem. How big is this problem? You can kind of do your public research and you can kind of build your top down or bottoms up market size opportunity, cafe look like a pretty big problem. You go start talking to people, right? The normal thing, I go find somebody qualified to give me a read on whether this is really a problem or not. The more of those you do just in my experience, you're like, okay, this is a problem.

Mike Fitzsimmons: Right. You've kind of done that self evaluation on the addressable market. You've got the evaluation on how competitive is it and how big a problem is it? Talking to some potential buyers, are they going to validate that this is an opportunity? I think it's some version of that, right. For you to get to that place at the green light. I think that's just, that's always been at least my approach and, I would say one caveat though, if you're doing something that's very before kind of blue ocean, the red ocean blue ocean analogy, and you're really creating a new market that people aren't even thinking about yet, the latter part of the validation, you might have to just have the conviction yourself to go figure that out. Like if you can validate that the Tam is there and all that good stuff, but you might not get conviction from potential buyers because they can't even register whether or not, they need you or not yet.

Mike Fitzsimmons: That part, it's just all personal conviction. I think some of those, I don't know that Ilan would tell you that he went and talked to anybody before he decided to go to Mars. Just said, I'm going tomorrow. Right. Certainly those on those entrepreneurs to that, they're in a different league than I, but are certainly those, both entrepreneurs that they just go and they just decide to go. I'm more calculated in my approach,

Kevin Horek: Sure. Do you think people should just dive fully in and quit their job or do it as a side hustle? Or what are your thoughts around that?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah, I mean the cool thing about the world we're in now, there's a lot of gig, weigh your opportunity to earn a living while you're incubating the company. Right. So that's cool. Like you can make money. That's always kind of been my thing, especially earlier in my career, I just would pick up a consulting gig of some sort or something that I could do to pay the bills. I do caution people. If, if you're going to start it while you're still working a full-time job, just do it the right way. Make sure you're doing the right disclosures. Don't expose yourself to any risk as it relates to, inventions agreements and things of that. Just do to do it the right way. If you're starting while you're still fully employed. Right. If you're gonna jump off the bridge, make sure you got your back covered and you got a pair of shoes.

Mike Fitzsimmons: I think just picking up our time consulting options is what I always did. Right. It was always a good formula for me, but the, but look, it's, it is a lot easier to get a company off the ground now than it has ever been. I think we talked about this the last time we connected. It's like, you can start, you don't, it's not, you don't even need a million, you used to be a million bucks just to get off the ground. I mean, you give it maybe, I think you said for less than 50 grand or something, you got your last one off. And I think that's the reality. Like you can get rolling here without a major capital requirement, as long as you have the team, and you've got a couple of folks you can rely on. They can help you build that initial product and get rolling.

Mike Fitzsimmons: So go do it. Cause it's doable.

Kevin Horek: No, I think that's really good advice, but sadly we're out of time. How about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about yourself, crosscheck and any other links you want to mention?

Mike Fitzsimmons: Yeah. Awesome. Again, thank you so much for hosting us crosscheck. You can find us on the web at dub.crosscheck.com and that's C R O S S C H q.com. It's felt a little funky with that Q a and if anybody wants to hit me directly, it's [e-mail], same spelling, C R O F S hq.com. Again, thanks so much for having us.

Kevin Horek: Perfect mic while I really appreciate you taking the time of your day to be on the show. I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day, man.

Gregg Oldring: Okay, bye. Well, Kevin, that was a great show. Again, Mike is a very interesting guy and he's been through some interesting experiences for sure. What did you get out of it, John?

Jon Larson: Oh, I, I think they're on to something really interesting and they're definitely addressing something that a lot of businesses, what I'm really interested in the locker idea, the data locker was that he called it and I also interested in his comments on how important it is to find the right team and the total addressable market when everybody asks him what Tam tab means, total addressable markets. I thought that was a really interesting observation.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. I also, I really liked his comments about finding signal. I'd love to hear more from their data side about, the statistics behind that. I guess some of it's, I think it's art and science. Sometimes it was my guests anyways. Oh, I wonder if they're more, have more science than art around that, finding a signal and knowing what's working and what's not working and getting some metrics around what you're trying to do. I thought that was a really some really interesting,

Jon Larson: Oh, and how many times do you run into that as a company, when you have customers asking for features that they say they need, and then you've built it and then you look at the usage and no one ever uses it.

Gregg Oldring: This thing to keep up for years and years to come, you're maintaining this thing that nobody really uses it,

Jon Larson: Everybody you're under the impression that it's a must have. So.

Kevin Horek: It's also interesting that his VCs were interested in exploring that, and then it wasn't used. It's just interesting how people that have been there and done that and invested in companies and in Mike's cases like even was building some of this stuff. They all thought that it was a viable thing, and then they still pivoted away from it. Right. I, I love when people like him talk about that and I wish I would have known some of that stuff earlier on in my career.

Gregg Oldring: That's probably, it that's a lesson for both entrepreneurs and investors. I think there are people and people working within companies, not to be afraid of that actually, this is the expectation that it's not going to go according to plan. The plan is going to be the guide, but it's not going to be exactly like that. So, don't be afraid of that, I guess. It's great.

Jon Larson: That was cool. I think his comment about optimism is really important along with the, if you can fail fast as well. So there's a fine balance there, but.

Gregg Oldring: Yeah. Like Daniel economy, I have to say about optimism and someone has books, so that's a, like a famous psychologist. Yeah. That's a, that's a valuable trait. Sure.

Jon Larson: I'm going to have to look at this traversing, the traction gap book. It's sounds like a really interesting book to read.

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